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(01:04): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Steve Oriola. He is the CEO of Unbounce. He is a tenured CEO with more than two decades of experience scaling Dynamic B2B SaaS platforms, including Act! Boy, World Slash SThere’s an oldie constant contact, Pipedrive and Julius. He recently led Unbounce through the acquisition of Insightly CRM, where the two companies effectively merged. But we’re going to talk today about a benchmark report, some new research that Unbounce did on conversion. So Steve, welcome to the show.

Steve Oriola (01:43): Great, thanks for having me, John. Appreciate it.

John Jantsch (01:45): So I mentioned ACT is Act still around. That was the first CRMI ever used 25 years ago.

Steve Oriola (01:52): Act is still around, has a portion of their business desktop and a smaller portion that is SaaS. So yeah, they’re still delivering.

John Jantsch (02:01): Wow, that’s great. Alright, so probably let’s just not bury the lead, right? The big thing that you guys have been promoting about your findings is that complex copy is herding conversion rate. So let’s start there. Tell me about that.

Steve Oriola (02:15): Sure, yeah. What we’re finding is that, and this is just a difference between 2020 and 2024, really over just three or four years. The actual copy that resonates in lands is now fifth to seventh grade level copy as opposed to a little bit more like ninth and 10th grade or eighth and ninth. And people aren’t getting dumber. We believe the noise is increasing and you have less of an opportunity to land a message and get attention. And that’s what we believe the dynamic is. And we think during Covid, people may have had a little bit more time to read possibly, but the noise is intense now and we find the difference between fifth to seventh grade language and professional language is like two X in terms of conversion. So it’s a significant difference.

John Jantsch (03:08): And I imagine some of it’s the filter, right? I mean, like you said, people aren’t getting dumber, they just are willing to invest less time. And so it’s like give it to me very quickly. Don’t make me dance around and get the plot. And I suspect that’s probably what’s going on as much as anything, right?

Steve Oriola (03:23): Yeah, there is, but if you read the report, there’s a lot of nuance in there, right? A statement like that, you go into a particular vertical and it stands on its head. So we are talking about industry wide and that’s really the power of the report is to drill down into a particular vertical and see what the impact really is.

John Jantsch (03:43): So people have been trying to kill out email, kill off email for many years.

Steve Oriola (03:48): The

John Jantsch (03:48): Report shows that email is still the highest converting channel. Why do you suppose so many people want email to die? Is it just because we are sick of getting it, but we also buy stuff?

Steve Oriola (04:00): No, I think it’s because we now have so many other forms of communication. People think, well, email is the old one that’s going to die. Email is, you have to keep in mind email is an effective store and forward mechanism. So if you think about use cases and storing forward is preferable, sometimes it’s there. You don’t have to read it right away. And the other thing that might make email seem more effective is it’s a bit of a lower funnel tactic and comparing it to higher in the funnel tactics for conversion, not really fair. Those higher in the funnel channels and tactics are very important, yet you might not act on them until you’re in an email and have something in your

John Jantsch (04:41): Yeah, so it’s an attribution issue as much as anything probably.

Steve Oriola (04:46): I think it’s a bit of an, and we say that in the report, we caution people, we say, look, email is a much more effective conversion mechanism, but it might not be the first stop. That’s

John Jantsch (04:57): Way. So along those same lines of conversion mobile versus desktop increasing, my clients are seeing 50, 60, 70% mobile visits, but this report found that, but that’s not where people are pushing by.

Steve Oriola (05:13): Well, they are. I think they’re converting on mobile, they’re just converting higher on desktop. But if mobile makes up 70% of your traffic, you got to look at it in real numbers too.

(05:24): And it’s probably worth grinding on that mobile conversion rate in your tactics, but understand that desktop does convert higher. I think there is, and this isn’t in the report, this is sort of me, there is sort of an assumption that maybe on mobile you’re not seeing everything. And in fact, that is a bit true. You do design your responsive mobile to not have everything because dealing with constraints on the device. And I think people just sort of have an understanding of that. And if they’re really going to make a decision about signing up for something, they may want to be on the desktop and feel like they have access to all the information.

John Jantsch (06:07): And I think going back to our attribution thing, I think if we were able to follow journeys as thoroughly as they happen, I mean we would find a lot of people doing research, finding stuff, and then going, oh, I’m going to go to the desktop now. Right?

Steve Oriola (06:19): Exactly. Yes. That’s a good point is yeah, you’re sitting on the couch and there’s a commercial on during the football game and you’re on your phone researching a landing page vendor or something.

John Jantsch (06:30): Yeah. So Unbounce clearly sees lots of landing pages built and sees the effectiveness of those. Where do you, and maybe the research directs some of this, but where do you counsel people when it comes to this idea of mobile first? That everything needs to be designed there first and work there and be optimized there first.

Steve Oriola (06:53): We believe in that. I mean, certainly deal with the hardest constraints upfront when you’re designing, and then you could probably loosen up as you get to desktop. And the reason people do that is if you start with desktop, you may not think about the constraints of mobile and then you’re designing for that and it’s really difficult. So just flat out in general, mobile first is the right strategy. I think from a conversion mechanism like a landing page, I think you, yes, mobile first, but I think you really need to consider the industry you’re in. If you’re in financial services, people will do research on mobile, but they’re going to make decisions when they’re in front of their computer at home. So I think it’s industry specific as well. So I recommend people comb through the data in here to get that kind of guidance.

John Jantsch (07:40): One of the highlights in the report, I guess maybe I don’t pay enough attention because maybe this wasn’t a surprise to you all, but it was a little bit surprise to me that Instagram is outperforming Facebook in terms of being a paid, converting paid social channel. Was that surprising?

Steve Oriola (07:59): Not for me and probably not for people in their twenties. I think what’s changing over time is we have different platforms by demographics being sort of dragged into adulthood in the business world. And I’m sure my daughter is more likely to do something on Instagram than Facebook for

John Jantsch (08:18): Sure.

Steve Oriola (08:19): So that certainly could be part of it. I also think Instagram just is a mobile first channel and application. And as you see mobile take over more and more of the traffic, that’s probably part of the dynamic as well.

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Steve Oriola (10:17): I’m sure there are AI tools out there. We wrote our own model to score grade level

(10:23): That is not available as an external service, but I’m sure there are those out there. And our methodology was to look at a whole variety of tools or methodologies to grade level people’s writing and reading and chat. GPT can help you simplify, but one of the things that’s in the report is the kinds of words that will make it more complex. And the number of three syllable or greater words in your should be a below 15%. So that’s all laid out in the report, and you can easily do that yourself by looking at the content. And again, gen AI can summarize and simplify and you can even ask it to, I think if you write in there, dumb it down, it will literally dumb it down for you. So there are ways to do

John Jantsch (11:18): It. Yeah, I’m terrible at writing run on sentences and I’m certain that probably gets in the way, right. Shorter sentences, probably better

Steve Oriola (11:27): Then don’t be a copywriter.

John Jantsch (11:29): That’s what editors are for. That’s right,

Steve Oriola (11:31): That’s right.

John Jantsch (11:31): So there are things in here. There were a couple of things that surprised me as I’ve mentioned. Were there things in here that surprised you all, especially since you’ve done this research before?

Steve Oriola (11:41): I think some of the spreads in conversion rates in some of the verticals were significant. I believe it’s health and I think financial services as well with regards to the complexity. The language, financial services actually benefits from a little more depth of language and a little more complexity of language. I think there’s an assumption there that if you’re pursuing financial products, that’s real impact on your life and you want to understand it a little bit more. So those kinds of departures from the median as we measured, most things were a little surprising in some of the verticals. Just the level of nuance once you get down into the verticals was surprising.

John Jantsch (12:23): I’m going to come back to the verticals, but I wonder if, I mean, you’re analyzing a lot of copy that is, I don’t know, top of funnel for a better word, that you’re getting attention, right? With landing pages in some cases or getting people to move to a next stage in a journey. Would you agree that potentially simpler language is better there because we don’t have a relationship as we get deeper and I’m starting to analyze, can you actually solve my problem? Do I want perhaps a more complex language or at least deeper language because I’m going to spend the time?

Steve Oriola (12:55): Well, landing pages are not only top of funnel. So landing pages,

John Jantsch (12:58): I knew you were going to say that

Steve Oriola (13:00): Landing pages would come into play further down the funnel, even in retargeting, even in customer marketing to your own customer base. So the closer you get to that, the more complex the language can be and probably the more information people are looking for. So I think that plays a role for sure.

John Jantsch (13:20): Yeah. So you talked a couple times about industry specific benchmarks. Would you suggest that somebody who’s thinking, oh, I’m going to read this thing and see what my industry is doing, would then actually be able to draw the conclusion of, oh, okay, we’re doing really well or we’re doing better than people in our industry, or we need to up our game. I mean, do you feel like they can use the tool that way?

Steve Oriola (13:42): That’s really the purpose of the tool.

John Jantsch (13:44): Yeah,

Steve Oriola (13:44): Exactly that. And we didn’t release all of the verticals yet. We’re still crunching data to write this report. We crunched a year’s worth of data, 57 million conversions, over 41,000 landing pages. And the verticals that didn’t show up as statistically significant. And those kinds of numbers aren’t in here, so it’s not going to cover everyone. I think if your vertical’s not in here, you could still look at verticals, you could look at the data overall, so it will work for everyone. But if your vertical’s in here, it’s a benchmark,

John Jantsch (14:18): Roughly how many verticals you think covers, it’s going to be tough for a specific,

Steve Oriola (14:23): Yeah, sorry, I think we did seven or eight and maybe we have that or more coming.

John Jantsch (14:27): Okay. Okay. Alright. Conversion rate optimization is obviously a huge part of landing pages of marketing in general of webpage of pretty much everything. How can we make this better, right? I think there are actually probably c-suite titles given to that function

Steve Oriola (14:46): Director level. I’ve seen VPs of CRO. Yep.

John Jantsch (14:50): So you talk about in this report something called simple CRO, and I think a lot of people feel like, no, it’s terribly complex. So explain how that differs.

Steve Oriola (15:01): We can give a lot of capabilities. Our platform is not just for building landing pages, we have an AB testing solution and it’s more than A and B, it’s sort of we can create multiple variants and pick the best copy and even prior to statistical relevance, that’s just a math problem. We can help and we can also maintain those variants and direct traffic to the variant that makes the most sense for you. And we’re taking signals in order to make those determinations. So it’s way more than a landing page platform. And I think that’s an important consideration because we were designing and building a CRO platform and that’s what it’s about. So we would call that pretty simple because the tools are there if you want to go further beyond what our tools let you do. We have a third of our customers, I’ll call them customers or agencies, and they serve well beyond our customer base. And a lot of those agencies are performance based and go quite a bit further and start optimizing for revenue and other things beyond the conversion where they have that data and usually it’s their MarTech stack that we’re integrated into. So there are ways to go much further beyond. We make CR os simple, but we also want our more advanced customers to be able to go further.

John Jantsch (16:31): How is Insightly the CRM showing up in the unbalanced product?

Steve Oriola (16:36): Sure. Well, it isn’t yet. We’ve been one company since July. We are integrating the platforms and you’re likely to see the landing page solution be an upsell for marketing automation, right? Insightly has both a CRM and a marketing automation platform. The data science team that we built to turn our platform into a CRO platform is now very dialed into the CR ad Insightly. So you’ll see the kinds of things that we can do and have done. We’ll start doing on CRM and in marketing automation. We also have an attribution solution, a company that we bought a couple of years ago called Leads rx. So we have all the makings of a pretty rich, dynamic, exciting marketing solution

John Jantsch (17:28): You take on Salesforce pretty soon, right?

Steve Oriola (17:30): There you go. Well, we know our market and we know where we’re going. We hope not to always be running into Salesforce.

John Jantsch (17:41): So I think in the report, I think this is where I grabbed this, you talk about attention spans being obviously part of the issue, and I think you identified 47 seconds. I’m not sure if that came right out of the report or not. So you see a lot of marketers read that and they’re like, how do we get attention fast? How do we do gimmicky things? So what are some of the best ways to capture first, I guess, and then retain attention if people are only going to give us so many seconds?

Steve Oriola (18:08): Yeah, I think it comes down to clarity, which is usually simplification in this context. It usually means simpler words, not four or five syllable words and shorter copy and test generate multiple variants and test. That’s really the only answer. And we give you a platform to do that.

John Jantsch (18:32): It truly is the only answer. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought, oh no, that’s the winner. That’s the winner for sure. And you’re like, what? Yeah,

Steve Oriola (18:39): No, that’s right. And some of the things, and as you comb through different verticals, some of the things are a little counterintuitive. So yeah, you got to look for that.

John Jantsch (18:47): Yeah, it turns out clarity is much harder than complexity, isn’t it? It’s speaking of counterintuitive, Steve, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by. Where would you invite people to connect, either with you or clearly those interested in getting the full report? Where would you send

Steve Oriola (19:02): That? Oh, go to unbound.com and you’ll get directed there from the homepage. Something will probably pop up and nudge you there too. So that’s where I’d start. And yeah, it’s a pretty good report, so it’s getting a lot of play.

John Jantsch (19:18): Again, appreciate you stopping by and taking a few moments. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.