1817 – High-Converting Websites with Arsh Sanwarwala of ThrillX

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Arsh (00:02:20) - Thanks for having me Josh. Very excited.

Josh (00:02:22) - Yeah. Well give us an overview of the work that you do with relax.

Arsh (00:02:26) - Yeah for sure. My name is arch. I'm the CEO at relax. We're basically a UX, UI design and conversion optimization firm based out of cold, cold Toronto, Canada.

Arsh (00:02:38) - Uh, just a bit about my background. And, you know how I got into UX design. So my background is originally in business and marketing, right? And I, you know, worked at several different companies and sales and marketing kind of found a natural inclination for UX design, just, you know, combined all of my different interests in psychology, design and at the heart of it business as well. And I worked at several companies, big companies, where I realized that even these big companies don't base decisions on actual data. Right. And I kind of saw that gap in the market that, you know, people are just throwing things at the wall. It's kind of decisions made on guesswork. And so naturally, you know, started a design agency where our focus is on that data piece and making decisions based on data, which we can, you know, get into as well.

Josh (00:03:34) - Yeah. So what you're saying is that most agencies or web developers are not, uh, what how are they typically making their decisions?

Arsh (00:03:42) - Yeah.

Arsh (00:03:43) - So it's interesting. I mean, it depends on what firm you're working with, but a lot of them, based on what looks good. Right. That's often one thing like visually what will look good, you know, to give you context. When I was, you know, working as a designer, um, for fortune 500,000 companies, a lot of people would get hung up on things like color, the color of a button, um, which doesn't really translate to any business impact. Right at the end of the day, unless you're a Google or something like that, where you know, you're testing multiple different shades of a color of a button, for most brands, it's not really going to drive any value. So it's those types of like minuscule things that, you know, people get hung up on. Um, yeah. Rather than the bigger things.

Josh (00:04:25) - Yeah. So like, how did you get into this? Like, what's your background that kind of led you into this more, uh, kind of data centric approach to design and development?

Arsh (00:04:37) - Yeah, that's a good question.

Arsh (00:04:38) - So I think at the heart of it. Right. Given that I have a business background, I realized that like everything to do with design at the end of the day is also driving business impact, right? Like good design on a website or good design principles, whether it's UX, UI that ultimately translates to the end goal, which is more revenue for a business. And so I think people often get those too kind of separated from one another. They think of design and business goals as two separate buckets, whereas as you know, they're very synergistic. They go hand in hand and you have to look at it from that combined angle itself.

Josh (00:05:18) - So someone's listening to us right now and they say, okay, we would love to take more of a data centric approach to how we're communicating or branding colors, copy, that sort of thing. Um, take us through maybe just kind of like a 101, um, like maybe some actionable things that people can do immediately so that they can value from what we're talking about.

Arsh (00:05:40) - Yeah. For sure. So I basically I think of it in three separate buckets. Right. You have your quantitative research, you have qualitative research, and then you have what I like to call like the time tested principles of human psychology and behavioral science, right, on any website or any digital product. So on the quantitative research side, you know, something that anyone can do listening on this call is install a tool like Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity where you can actually watch recordings of users on your website. You can, you know, track heatmap data, see where people are clicking, see where they're navigating, and moments of drop off and hesitation as well. And a very practical tip is if you know something for a fact resonates with your customers, and you know that, you know, talking with your customers, that you know, that's one of the reasons that they buy your product. Or for B2B company, you know, they work with your with your service. If that's at the bottom of the page or the middle of the page, and you can track on hotjar that only 30% of people are reaching that section while you have a low hanging fruit opportunity right there.

Arsh (00:06:50) - Right. Moving that, uh, higher up on the page. Right. In terms of order of priority. So that's like, you know, small insight that you can gain just by looking at scroll maps and seeing how far are people actually scrolling on your website. The qualitative side is often underrated, where you can install a tool called User Brain, where you can run remote test on your website. So imagine I get you to go on my site. Josh and I say, what are your first impressions upon landing? Can you actually go through the process of filling up my form, and I'm able to get your qualitative feedback as to how you perceive the experience. So that's the qualitative side where you get a ton of insight from there. Um, and then the principles of human psychology are just, uh, you know, looking at the anatomy of a high converting site, clear messaging, social proof, like reviews of, uh, as soon as you land on the site, all of those things go hand in hand and make a huge difference.

Arsh (00:07:47) - And most people can get started straight away.

Josh (00:07:50) - Excellent hour. What are some examples of companies you've worked with? And I don't know if you've got maybe some stories of like well before. Relax. This is what they were dealing with after. Relax. Here's what we did and here's what the results were. I don't know if you could tell us some stories like that.

Arsh (00:08:06) - Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Uh, one of our very funny product, it's like a it's like a product for canned beverages. It's a shotgun product. If you know what shotgunning a drink is right where you poke a hole in the drink and then you're able to drink it. It's a funny product, but, uh, they do very well, right? They get 100,000 plus visitors to their website per month. You know, they drive majority of the traffic through their website. And so we were kind of tasked on a conversion optimization, uh, engagement where, you know, their website just wasn't performing. They weren't really able to get a lot of revenue through their site, even though they were getting a lot of traffic.

Arsh (00:08:45) - And one of the first things that we did was we looked at recordings and we saw people actually navigating on their site. They had product bundles, so they had five different product options. We noticed that people were choosing the either the lower priced option or they would exit the site completely. And so we hypothesized that cutting down from 5 to 3 kind of the paradox of choice, right? If you give people too much choice, it equals no choice at all. That test alone led to 53% lift in conversions and 13.5% lift in the average order value. So this is an e-commerce specific example. But yeah, I mean it just transformed their business like conversion optimization. They more than doubled their conversion rate over, you know, period of nine months. And as they kind of get more traffic to their site, that revenue they get as well is also amplified. So the same applies for any industry or any business, even B2B.

Josh (00:09:43) - Hours. How would somebody know that they should have a conversation with you? So in other words, they might look at their website and go, yeah, I mean, that's probably doing what it's supposed to be doing, but maybe they don't know.

Arsh (00:09:56) - Yeah, it's both sides of the funnel. Right? Like the average conversion rate on a website will be 1 to 3%. So if you're noticing that you're underperforming or you're sitting at above, you know, about average and you want to bump that up, you know that would be a good time to engage. But a lot of the brands that work with us to also have, you know, good conversions, but they want to take it even further. Right. Because there's two ways to kind of double your business from a digital marketing perspective, which is you double the traffic or you double the conversions, right? And doubling your conversions is a lot cheaper. It's also more effective because you get more traffic and you, you know, get more revenue out of that traffic. So it really depends on where you're at. But even if you're lower or average conversion or even great conversions, you can, you know, we can still help. Yeah.

Josh (00:10:48) - And let's say when you start working with somebody, how does that usually begin? And where do you start with a client?

Arsh (00:10:56) - Yeah, it always starts with discovery first, right? Strategy research.

Arsh (00:11:01) - Something I often say is that with websites, you know, even when I'm doing a lot of like website audits, there's no such thing as best practices in web design, right? Everything needs to be tested. Now. There are certain principles, right, or certain overarching facets of websites that should be implemented in everything but the manner in which you implement those can vary. So, for example, you know, clean navigation or easy to use navigation is a best practice, but the manner in which you do that best practice will vary. And all that to say, our first part of any engagement is understanding the business, understanding the audience, the company and the industry. Right? Because without those, you know, all of the tests or any of the website changes we're implementing won't be effective if it doesn't resonate with their specific scenario. From there, we do a deep dive into their analytics, their business. We develop personas, look at journey maps, and kind of go through that full end to end UX user experience design process to then, you know, do the website redesign or do conversion optimization.

Arsh (00:12:17) - So at a high level, that's kind of the step by step.

Josh (00:12:20) - Yeah. You know, I was looking at your LinkedIn and uh, one thing that you talk about and this is really interesting, I don't know that I've ever heard of this cognitive load theory. Can you explain what that is?

Arsh (00:12:33) - Yeah for sure. So I'm trying to think of a clever analogy to explain it, but, uh, I'll explain it in layman's terms. So you go on any website, right. And you have a pop up banner, right? You have a, then you have the cookie banner that comes up at the bottom. Um, you have, you know, some sliding animations coming on the screen. You have a big block of text, you have this huge navigation at the top, you have all of these different elements. And I'm immediately confused right in five within the first five seconds. In other words, the cognitive load to digest and consume all of that information is way too much. And so part of what we always think about is how can we simplify the experience, right? How can we reduce friction across the buying journey, whether that's filling out a form or buying a product and thinking about if you were to actually use that website, is it an enjoyable experience? Does it reduce the cognitive load at a high level?

Josh (00:13:36) - Yeah, it's kind of the adage of the, you know, the confused mind does nothing.

Josh (00:13:42) - And if there's, you know, it's like there's so many different calls to action, so many. It's like the brain's like, ah, you know, as opposed to your next step is here or certainly, you know, how do you do that when you've got, let's say, a, you know, someone's like, we just have a lot of stuff on our website.

Arsh (00:14:01) - Yeah, I think it comes back to data. Right? In the very beginning, it's looking at a heat map. Right. Let's say you think you have a lot of information on your homepage. What does the data actually say? If I look at a heat map, I can see that, you know, my button, my call to action button, which is by now or, you know, contact us gets a ton of clicks. But then my social media icons are not getting as many clicks. And then the question becomes, while is social media icons actually important for conversions? Is it important to my user? Is it important to my business to actually incentivize some sort of action? And if it's not and it's not getting any clicks, then that's something that can get removed, right? So you're really thinking about it from a database lens as to where are people actually clicking, where are they actually navigating, and does it actually contribute to the overall buying journey.

Arsh (00:14:53) - And then step by step, you can, you know, kind of twiddle it down and take stuff out.

Josh (00:14:59) - Yeah. Your website thrill X design, I'm seeing a couple of things that I think might be pretty valuable, including a website review and audit. So again, your website thrill X design. And again we get the spelling of that and everything for our podcast listener. Just click around in the podcast app. You'll see where we got the show notes and the direct link there. But when somebody does start kind of diving into your world, what would you recommend they take a look at or dive into or, you know, what do they do next?

Arsh (00:15:29) - Uh, in terms of like with us?

Josh (00:15:31) - Yeah, if they're interested in this topic or interested in you and potential or in particular.

Arsh (00:15:35) - Yeah for sure. So I'll answer both of those. So the first thing is install Hotjar clarity on your site. Uh, definitely low hanging fruit and just start watching recordings, heatmaps. You get a ton of insight there.

Arsh (00:15:46) - And you know, in terms of with us, I mean, we have a free website audit. It's one of the ways that we've actually scaled our company through cold outreach and also inbound, you know, doing these free audits where we'll do a deep dive into your business. We'll look at your website and basically point out, you know, anywhere from 7 to 10 different things that you can improve on your site straight away. So it's very personalized and tailored.

Josh (00:16:11) - Yeah. Again, the website thrill x design Arsh Sanwarwala. You're the CEO or she's been a great conversation. Anything else. You know, kind of final closing thoughts for someone particularly, you know, looking at our year ahead and goals and that sort of thing.

Arsh (00:16:30) - Yeah. It would be please start looking at data. Yeah. I can't stress it enough. It's the whole reason I started this business. Right. Like even it pains me just looking at some websites and like money being left on the table. So yeah, just start looking at the data.

Josh (00:16:45) - Would be my hours. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us.

Arsh (00:16:49) - Thanks, Josh.

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