The Process That Makes CRO Actually Work: Talia Wolf, Founder of GetUplift

Any monkey can change button colors. But for CRO (conversion rate optimization) to really work, it needs to be driven by a rigorous process. You know who gets it? Talia Wolf, the founder of GetUplift.

Tune in to learn why you shouldn’t listen to your grandfather, what CRO best practices aren’t…and how low I’m willing to go for a pun.

Talia’s Go-To CRO Tools

• HotJar for heatmaps and user behavior analysis (like site surveys, screen recordings, and polls)
• Typeform for creating customer surveys
• Invisionapp for communicating new UI variations

Key Links GetUplift.co A great video by Talia about retention-level CRO Great summary of Talia’s emotional target methodology Optimus Prime

Episode Transcript

Eytan Buchman My name is Eytan Buchman, this is Two Minute Marketing, and if I was a Transformer, I’d be Optimize Prime. Couldn’t resist because today… we’re going to talk about conversion rate optimization – CRO – done right There’s something about CRO that feels like Black Magic. And it finally hit me why. You see the case studies with little tweaks anyone can make But how do you choose which ones? You process up.

Talia Wolf So I’m Talia, and I am a conversion optimization specialist. I help businesses all over the world optimize their websites, their funnels, to basically increase their conversions. My main focus is on something called emotional targeting, it’s a methodology that I’ve developed through the years in order to tap into to those real emotions and what drives peoples decisions.

Eytan Buchman As I mentioned earlier, button color tweaking isn’t a strategy or a process. It’s a monkey pulling levers and hoping it works.

Talia Wolf Conversion optimization isn’t about changing elements on the page, it’s about solving peoples problems. So I focus most of my work on identifying the audience, understanding their problems, their pains, their concerns, the hesitations that people feel. Then create experiences for my clients that increase conversions using that information

Eytan Buchman Basically, from Talia’s perspective, a good CRO pro is a website user psychology. And that means that the potential extend way beyond conversions.

Talia Wolf But I actually see conversion optimization as a way to gain amazing insights about your audience, understand them better and then be able to essentially test everything you do. Instead of testing call to action buttons, or headlines, or just elements on the page you can really test specific strategies and hypothesis that will teach you a lot about your customers.

Eytan Buchman That makes sense. My grandmother’s dream car does not look like my dream car (mine has fewer fire and skull decals on the side). Similarly, small tweaks need to be driven by better clarity about your audience. Changes are driven by understanding your user, not random guesses. But even defining those users is something that marketers don’t always do so well

Talia Wolf Normally when I speak to any marketer and I ask them, hey you know who’s your customer? What do they do? Why do they buy from you? Most companies, most businesses will tell me, my customer is aged 25 to 32, they live in these geographical locations. They use these devices, these browsers. Maybe they’ve built some personas, so they have some guessing game going on about what they work at, and what TV shows they like to watch. But it’s very behavioral, it’s based on data and numbers. I think that we tend to forget that behind those screens are actual people.

Eytan Buchman Other people’s best practices won’t solve YOUR problems.

Talia Wolf My most famous saying is that, best practices suck. Because best practices are someone else’s, they are not defined to your specific audience. So if you know that people are motivated by the fact that they want to feel loved, or they want to feel successful, or appreciated, it’s then much easier to choose the right psychological colors, psychological triggers. The different copy that you’re using, what images to use, the whole strategy comes in so much clearer, because you understand the customer better.

Eytan Buchman And, despite what your grandfather told you…don’t trust your gut.

Talia Wolf But the most common mistake that I see is people not doing research, going by gut feeling. Going by what you think will increase conversions. People aren’t doing their research, they’re not going the whole way, and not going deep enough. What happens with that is that when you go live with different tests, or even with a design, after simply doing the very basic things like just looking at Google analytics. But not doing the profound research that you should about your target audience, you end up with little results, sometimes none at all, and it’s very, very frustrating. But if you focus on really optimizing for people and creating an experience that they want to convert to, you’ll increase conversions.

Eytan Buchman And, for the record, I did that research and I get you. I know that you love conversions. i know that you loved that Optimize Prime joke. And I know that you’re barely listening because you’re busy friends about this awesome podcast, available on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, everywhere else. Talia lives online at getuplift.co, I’m not far down the road, at buchman.co.il, and until next time…happy marketing.