In one of the most insightful and enlightening films of the 20th century, the prescient Mel Brooks gave us a glimpse into the ecommerce strategy most common in 2026…
Yo man, go northward, you go southward… I’m gonna walk here round here in a circle…
What a great movie. If you haven’t seen History of the World Part 1 or don’t remember the scene, here is a 3 minute reefresher on youtube.
Mucho importante side note — in 2027, Mel Brooks is giving us the gift that we forgot we always wanted - Spaceballs: The New One (trailer)... I’m so freaking excited.
Just like in the clip above, your boss is probably telling you to go both northward and southward while they walk around in a circle of ai-psychosis.
You will have to choose which direction you want to go, because if you ask them, 95% of the time they won’t even know what you just asked, and will therefore choose whichever one they most recently heard on a podcast.
So what are those directions?
Incrementality
Big Swings
One is not better than the other. Which option you choose comes down to a single question: Are you satisfied with your website?
This is subjective but an important split… When you show a friend your site, are you showing off, or shying away?
If you are showing it off like a work of art, that is awesome, and CRO to you should be about incrementality.
If you are not confident, and find yourself making excuses for something that needs to be done, or skipping over sections you don’t like. those are signs you need to take some Big Swings.
Me and my site right now?
I’m going for the Big Swings.
I am not satisfied with our site. I am not a designer, and it shows. A few major business decisions have been made in the last month that affect our direction and the on-site messaging needs to catch up.
And to be honest, I’ve looked at this site for a year. I am tired of it. I want to see something different. There is nothing the data to suggest this notion is a good one, but that is not how energy works..
But first, let’s look at both avenues and what they mean for you.
This is a word that is long, and I suspect the reason you hear it so often in CRO conversations is because it sounds “sophisticated".”
Back to our question — Are you satisfied with your website?
When you answer YES to this question, you have already swung the big swing, and you want to continually improve the UX inch by inch, compounding the lift.
In Mouse Whisperer, this is where the Store Snapshot comes into play.
You can use this Snapshot to gather a list of pages and how they stand up next to each other, by revenue, traffic, CTR, or CVR…
Then you start the Page Snapshots by using the checkbox and upper-right button.
You are already 2 steps into your CRO workflow, and you have let your customers feed you the right data for analysis — and I love analysis, so don’t worry about there being some AI to come in and muck everything up… we leave that up you, as the person(s) who actually understand the nuances of your business, customers, and industry.
Then you are ready to start making changes and running tests… the fun part.
Sometimes you gotta swing big…
Again, back to that question — Are you satisfied with your website?
If you are not happy with your site, everything is bogged down. Less excitement around email marketing and paid ads… Your social creatives will be lackluster and less coherent in messaging. Your budgets will be tighter and more scrutinized… and it all comes back to a lack of confidence.
When you are not confident, you are not running full steam ahead. And you need to have that confidence.
Big Swings, in my perspective, are when you completely change the core elements:
Positioning
Messaging
Visual Storytelling
New Pages for new marketing campaigns
New internal workflows
These are fundamental changes that have downstream effects. When you decide to shift the messaging, for example, you will be updating copy on multiple page sand promo material.
For me, we are taking a big swing becase we want to:
Re-write copy sitewide
Re-work template layouts
Replace old photos with new photoshoot
Update colors and fonts
Launch a few new products
And that is going to be a boatload of work… which I should probably get to about now.
Everyone involved in design and web building knows that redesigns are usually bad. Not always, but sometimes customers dont care as much about the aesthetics as you do, and new redesigns can be confusing to them.
But a reset is more on the content level than the design level… obvious it is a good chance to update some design elements, but it will look like a better version of your store, not a new store.
That is what I have on my plate for the next two weeks.
Go checkout correcttoes.com now if you want to see what it looks like before we implement the big swings.
And until then…
- Shep
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