Does your agency website convert as well as it should? Why do clients buy from your agency? It might be time to take an objective look to determine how your agency website can convert more clients. It’s a practice that will help you improve as a business and get a pulse on your audience’s decision-making process. Today’s guest founded one of the first CRO agencies in America and has a lot of experience understanding what his clients need versus what they want. He's sharing his story about growing his successful agency and ways you can improve your website to convert more clients by looking at the functional, emotional, and social reasons they buy from you.

Khalid Saleh is the CEO of Invesp, one of the first dedicated CRO Agencies in North America. His agency has worked with the likes of eBay and Target, as well as smaller startups. As an eCommerce software architect, Khalid built his career devising ecommerce and optimization solutions for companies like American Express. Today he’ll reveal how some of the most important changes to a business website must come from careful testing and how, in that process, he’s usually humbled by clients.

In this episode, we’ll discuss:

What clients want vs. what clients need.
Improve your agency website to convert more clients.
Getting to the core of why clients buy.

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Sponsors and Resources

E2M Solutions: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by E2M Solutions, a web design, and development agency that has provided white-label services for the past 10 years to agencies all over the world. Check out e2msolutions.com/smartagency and get 10% off for the first three months of service.

Podcast Takeover!!

Get to know your Smart Agency Guest Host: Dr. Jeremy Weisz is the co-founder of Rise25, an agency that helps companies launch and run podcasts profitably. He followed Jason’s podcast and eventually joined the mastermind and has been a guest on the podcast before. Today, he’s helping Jason bring something new to the Smart Agency podcast audience by interviewing a special guest and getting a new perspective to the show.

What Clients Want vs. What Clients Need

Khalid got the opportunity of a lifetime to work with Motorola revamping their ecommerce website in 2005. It was a dream come true for any software engineer as he had access to all the technology he needed to build the best website.

The project took endless nights of hard work but the site was ready in three months. However, after so many hours of work and resources poured into the website, they quickly learned the site was not converting. They had almost no orders. As a software engineer, this was outside Khalid's expertise. The site was built as expected so his job was done. Nonetheless, Khalid became very interested in how something like this could happen and the idea for his agency, Invesp, was born.

Now his agency helps brands increase conversion rates by getting to the core of their goals. It boils down to what clients want versus what clients actually need. Often times clients think they just want to revamp their websites, but they actually want help growing their business.

Improving Your Agency Website to Convert More Clients

Khalid and his team know that website CRO starts with looking at the website from the client's perspective. Once he understood that clients chose his agency in order to grow their business, his team made some adjustments to the agency website. First, they got rid of any language that sounded too formal. He wants clients to feel like they’re being greeted as a friend. He also removed ambiguous language and tried to be very clear about what his agency does. Too often a company’s website uses vague language. As a result, people leave not having any idea about what they do. In this sense, the friendly language must be balanced with practical descriptions of the ways you help clients.

Next, clients browsing the website may worry their team lacks experience. So they added social proof of the different companies they’ve worked with and the results they’ve achieved. They even added video testimonials to offer additional evidence and not just claims of success.

Khalid and his team designed the website according to what they wanted the client’s user journey to look like. They strategically mapped it out to answer their main questions and concerns and address their core needs. This is what he did for his agency and part of how he helps clients increase their CRO.

Why Clients Can Humble the Most Experienced Marketing Agency Experts

In his keynote speeches, Khalid often refers to being humbled by clients. Sometimes all your research and testing does not prepare you for the clients’ reactions. Even though the research indicates one option is the most likely to bring more website traffic and clicks, you may be quickly humbled by the actual response. It’s something every business owner, marketer, or designer can relate to.

Anytime you run an experiment in marketing you have a hypothesis. You may be proven correct or find you’ve misinterpreted what the audience wants. With several options, one wins, and the others lose. Why did some of them not work out? This is a tricky question you should always ask to get a better understanding of what works for your audience.

Some clients may agree there are reasons to change a design but don’t think testing is necessary. They can’t choose one design out of several options so they figure any of them will do. This is where Khalid’s team insists on the importance of testing each design out. Usually, the results end up surprising everyone. Out of four designs that seemed equally good maybe two actually reduce the conversion rate, while the results for the other two show a clear winner. This is why testing is so important.

Getting to the Core of Why Your Clients Buy from Your Agency

Anyone who’s been through business school has probably heard that “no one buys a quarter-inch drill, they buy a quarter-inch hole”. That saying refers to the practical results you expect to get when you buy a product. In reality, for every action we take there are functional results, social results, and emotional results. For instance, if you buy a car you’ll be able to get from point A to point B (functional), you’ll feel like you’ve accomplished something (emotional), and maybe get your peers’ praise (social).

However, getting people to admit this is difficult. You must be very good at customer interviews by structuring them in a conversational style. After establishing the conversation, Khalid recommends going back to when the problem began. Ask questions that take the prospect back to the moment they decided to make the purchase. The more they remember and open up with details about their purchase decision, the better results you'll get about the emotional and social response to the purchase. These results are better than just asking direct questions about the product and purchase experience.

Do You Want to Transform Your Agency from a Liability to an Asset?

If you want to be around amazing agency owners that can see what you may not be able to see and help you grow your agency, go to Agency Mastery 360. Our agency growth program enables you to take a 360-degree view of your agency and gain mastery of the 3 pillar systems (attract, convert, scale) so you can create predictability, wealth, and freedom.

Improve Your Agency's Website and Convert More Clients with Khalid Saleh | Ep #629

Smart Agency Masterclass with Jason Swenk: Podcast for Digital Marketing Agencies