The absolute and relative value of sales is directly interrelated to conversion rates; a minor increase in conversion rate can affect the value of sales largely. Furthermore, the profit from natural organic traffic or online advertising campaigns is increased. Conversion funnel optimization is capable of displaying the difference between good profit generation on a website, compared to simply hovering over its break-even point. A good method of execution involves fewer careful and yet faster steps towards handling your conversion rate to increase it.
If you run an e-commerce site then conversion is purchasing one of your products. Conversion is the specific action that one would want people visiting their site to take. If you are a blogger, then signing up for your email newsletter would be a conversion. For a SaaS founder, a conversion would be trying out a free trial. Hence, conversion varies from business to business; it requires functioning according to your business’s needs and goals in that particular field of work.
The benefits of conversion rate optimization are proven as 223% more ROI is enjoyed by businesses that do conversion rate optimization. Businesses that don’t use conversion rate optimization simply never get to enjoy the benefits of it.
It’s not just about the revenue or profit increase that comes with optimization; it also takes into account marketing cost savings. Conversion rate optimizations help you cut back on your cost per acquisition by 50% maximum easily because then you tend to get more sales no matter the circumstance. You may have traffic that hasn’t grown, and yet you will have better sales because of conversion rate optimization and the cutback. The process of beginning a conversion rate optimization plan helps identify leaks and bottlenecks in your individual marketing funnel. Once you and your team are made aware of those problems, you may start working on fixing them, which in turn will be beneficial and maximize productivity for your business. This way, potential leads, and customers are not wasted, and time is managed well while being utilized efficiently. This is how conversion rate optimization will lead to saving marketing costs and increasing revenue.
Nonetheless, having people continuing visiting your website is necessary and shouldn’t be stopped but what I would personally recommend is to first begin with optimization and move on to the next step. What’s the point of wasting all of that money on huge ads that people only ever want to get rid of? Paid advertising is only for people who have too much money to spend and could also choose to toss it out the window without a dent in their income. How about you spend that money more smartly? Do you want to think of a way….let me help you… what about hiring a UX consultant who is hired by people just to increase your profit, huh?
Finally, conversion rate optimization assists you in scaling your business faster since you can now divert the earned funds to other parts of your work. Eventually, you will be satisfied with the competitive edge, and it gives you power over your other competitors. Investing in conversion rate optimization will be one of the most clever steps you take to maximize your efficiency.
Conversion rate optimization has three stages as mentioned below;
The image given below gives an adequate description of all three phases.
The three broad aspects from which you may start gathering data are mentioned turn by turn for you to look at each.
The website that you are developing or the company you work for comes under this section. There is a lot of information that you may collect through them to make good decisions to make informed tests.
I think we must always start by contemplating why. If you try to better understand the heart of the company and what makes it stand out, you will also understand what it attracts. Asking the right questions is important as this isn’t simply about finding USPs, but it goes into the depth of your company’s core.
What is the culture of your company? Try to understand the branding value of your company and what it sells to its customers. Understand the experiential value that is provided through the products your company sells by the message it promotes.
The objective is also part of the core of what it takes to understand a company. The reasons should be fairly obvious, and it is important to focus on the process of discovering and testing relevant things to move towards these goals. Some goals are the broad macro-level goals, whereas some are micro-level goals that are less visible than others. These are called ‘micro-conversions. They can include all the small significant detail that add up to contribute to your ultimate goal. An example would be to get consumers attracted to your product and signing up for your newsletters.
What makes your company stand out in comparison to your competitors? We have competitors that sell similar products, and we find the need to innovate and different from them. To be the first choice for your customers, it would help if the USP of your company is something that cannot be emulated by your competitors. For example, if your company offers free delivery, it would improve conversions significantly. It is still something that your competitors can adapt as well.
It helps to speak to people that exist within the organization and those that are involved in marketing to understand this. Talking to different departments like the sales staff and inquiring about the procedure of selling products and asking them what they feel the USPs are and what are the common objections to the product. Customer support and customer feedback is also a great department to start with; it will include observing what customers tend to give positive and negative feedback on. Oftentimes, product improvements are suggested when inquiring customers.
In this aspect, I will be focusing on the website itself and see what data is relevant and needs to be gathered to inform our experimentation process.
I would recommend that at this point, it is important to sit down with your customer and a notebook or whiteboard to define the process from beginning to end. It will include each essential aspect between the client and the site along with marketing materials like an email. From this point onwards, you may delve into the process to identify where all the problems occur. Another important point would be to review funnels in analytics or to organize them while setting them up if they have not been yet. Locating the common drop-off points will be beneficial while you analyze why. A technical problem is likely to be the case at times for the drop-off in conversions, to prevent that you should ensure that the data is segmented by browsers to try and identify problems.
This will involve delving into the existing analytics data to analyze the current information obtained from the website. Here, you’re just trying to grasp the core of a few things.
The impact of this is on your testing process; you may learn to discover a bunch of things. If you have low traffic numbers, you can understand how long it will take for a test to complete.
Typically, this will require you to enable extra tracking if you’re working on Google Analytics.
Observing browser usage is necessary, but to add to that, it is also important to figure out what devices are being used by the users. For example, if you observed a high number of mobile users, then you should check what your website shows up as on a mobile device. Nonetheless, even if you’re noticing lower numbers from mobile phone users, you should still work on how your website is displayed to them, as there has been a significant growth of mobile user traffic in recent years.
The website should hopefully already have objectives set for them, or eCommerce tracking enabled. This would make this task a lot easier! If that is not the case, you will be required to get it enabled as soon as possible to start gathering important data. This is a step that cannot be ignored no matter what, as measuring results of CRO testing is done because of this. Measuring conversions after CRO tests is not possible without this step.
Goals are incredibly essential, and for those who haven’t yet set them up, “Paditrack” helps sync it to Google Analytics account and then apply your goals to older data. It also allows you to segment your funnels which sadly Google Analytics did not have an option for. Therefore, if you do have this data then you can try and identify patterns in the kind of people that choose to convert, along with where these people come from. It’s tricky, however, to trace where your users are coming from because they all tend to use different channels. To fix that and make it easier to locate those users, multi-channel reports will need to be checked upon and observed for which ones are the most common locations.
Many platforms of analytics do not integrate back-end data even though time is changing. Unfortunately, this will require thorough digging to find offline data that exists. However, many companies do tend to have data on canceling and refunding rates. Standard analytics does not include this view as it takes place offline. You can still find out what the reason behind customers canceling a service is or what made them want a refund by gathering information about products and customers.
It’s potentially the best source to gather feedback and data that is relevant. The biggest impact is produced by information gathered directly from clients through different methods.
I think that the most insightful of all things is to delve into the core of the one thing people think about while wanting to purchase a product and what exactly stops them from making that purchase.
There’s a presentation on a similar topic by conversion rate experts that outlines all of these important questions to inquire regarding customers. These three questions from Avinash are also important in this particular stage of the process. I’ll provide more detail on this topic.
I’ve used these surveys many times and frankly, they have given us great insight. The results have a wide range and some tend to be useless and irrelevant. But if you blur out the vague ones and identify trends, that’s where the sweet spot is! You will find at least something that can tell you about all the problems and considerations you should be looking into.
Survio is a survey tool that you may have already seen on several websites. An image of it is given below:
It doesn’t feel intrusive when the user is working and the user experience isn’t hindered. I also like how it includes cool customization settings to make it look like what you prefer. An example is how you can choose for it to appear only on certain pages or when a user does something specific. This tool is very helpful and convenient as it can also only show up when it seems like the user is about to leave the website. A tip I would recommend is to have this show up after a customer has placed an order, on the order confirmation page. You may ask them “What nearly stopped you from making this purchase today?” and this is a great tip because there is a low risk on the feedback you receive. Survio can be used on a mobile device along with laptops and more. Hence, you will be able to tailor everything according to your preference.
Survey Monkey is a great tool if you have a good email list that is responsive, active, and stays engaged. Email surveys can be run using this tool and this may seem a bit tricky because there’s a variety of people on your email list that are present. They may not even know what your product is. AYTM has been used by me in the past for running surveys too and it offers more options than Survey Monkey’s free version.
Some companies and sites tend to offer user testers for hire. You may get a range of people to select from according to whatever characteristics you’re aiming for such as age, gender, specializations, etc. They can complete your tasks and meet your requirements focused on your website. Another way to use them is by making them do tasks focused on your competitors’ profile through research and the purchase of a product. The individual you hire can also record and share with you as they get through their tasks.
This step involves outlining what I will be testing. You will be surprised to know that many people jump straight to this step without covering any data collection and randomly test whatever feels right to them. Now I should be using all the information that I gathered to make an informed decision in this step. The following questions are useful to ask to help gather relevant and useful insight through your data.
To have my tests based on a logical analysis received from the website, customers, and the company in the first step, I will ask myself what I would like to test? Going back to the data to identify the common trends that can be noticed adds to your work. I prefer to start by looking at customer objections and find what is most common amongst them to work on that first. If the customer feedback tells me that they worry about the payment details and their safety, then you may assume that if you add more details that ensure trust, it will increase sales. One more example could be if the analysis from the sales team proved that getting a money-back guarantee makes people more likely to try out a product, then you could implement that policy. The confirmation page or checkout process is the best place to identify the best selling point for your hypothesis. When you’ve hypothesized, you should learn to understand what a successful result looks like. It may sound plain and simple, but this is something that needs to be quite clear for you. To know which result is positive and having a chance of knowing what the right answers are, is important.
Other than in terms of demographics, it is important to understand what your buyers are like. Knowing the kind of people who visit your website helps gain perspective on your audience, which in turn improves your buying cycle process. An essential aspect to keep in your mind is new customers and returning customers. They need to be analyzed separately, as testing them together would give uneven and unreliable results, which you will not be able to count on. Their mindsets differ, and so do their experiences.
If you’ve done a good job with your product and customer experience, returning customers will need no more convincing. They have already accepted your company brand, and you may also already have their credit card details. One thing to look out for is remembering that everyone can’t be segmented perfectly well. This is because analytics data quality can only help you segment to an extent, and beyond that, there’s not much you can do other than to observe your tracking process carefully. Using the best practice will help you succeed in this aspect of segmenting customers.
An example from Optimizely is mentioned here to see how some software can allow you to direct traffic to your test pages based on specific attributes:
Segmentation by the browser is also useful and can be seen above. Another reason that it’s useful is if you have bugs within certain browsers of your testing page. An example of this is that you can get rid of Firefox if you discover that your test doesn’t load there and so those users will be kept aside and excluded. Hence, a short-term fix is provided.
Here all you need to do is specify which page or set of pages you wish to be testing. You can decide between a single page or several pages and set them up for testing. Several pages when measured can make it difficult to have clear or accurate results as the buying cycle for each product may differ. An example can be if product A is expensive and costs $600 and product B costs $30, then these products have to be measured differently otherwise the results will be skewed. A simple checklist to maintain and cross-check your tracking code is useful. All of these are simple essential things that should not be forgotten.
The experimental stage involves implementing the testing process. I will always advise people to never jump to this step, this is also a crucial step that involves careful analysis of the past collected data.
This step depends from circumstance to circumstance; you might not have to try wireframing. You can make changes to your website directly using tools like Optimizely or Visual Website Optimizer if you do not currently need to sign off on test designs that are new. It will prove to be beneficial to thoroughly plan the changes you want to make so that you can check again and make a systematic list. A couple of questions you could ask are:
The changes should always directly test the hypothesis, and since it can be easy to go off track while working, it is good to take a step back. Recheck what your hypothesis is and text exactly what you expected and wanted to test.
If your website is on a very large scale then it is difficult to keep track of the multiple stakeholders in the website like UX teams, marketing teams, design teams, etc. Getting things signed off may be difficult; nonetheless, there are usually good reasons for it. Fundamental changes to your site that may involve completely altering the design and page layout would likely not get a sign-off easily unless you have an important position of trust in your company.
I have run into some issues where our changes have been difficult to directly implement. They tend to require some time to develop a strategy to smoothly make it to operation. If you have the time and availability to practice the development process, it will go better and well. However, if you do not have the time, then the tests will have to be limited to less complex ones. Hence, while designing tests and figuring out a hypothesis it is important to keep this in mind. Options like Balsamiq and Mockingbird are great wire-framing tools to try out.
Optimizely was used by me to implement designs and to run slip tests on customer’s websites. If your design is complex, more work goes into it to keep the design running smoothly live. Visual Website Optimizer is a good alternative if Optimizely doesn’t work out. If a browser doesn’t render the design properly it can be quite off-putting for the users, which is why visual elements should be maintained well. You may also now choose who should view the test, Optimizely displays it in this way;
It also allows you to choose what section of your traffic will be directed to the testing page. This can help with easing down the chances of risk if a test results in conversion rates dropping with high traffic numbers. If you send 11% of your traffic to the test would mean that the remaining 89% of traffic will carry on normally. Optimizely would display it in this way:
Connecting optimizely to your Google analytics account will help you determine the usual order value for each set of visitors you direct to the conversion tests. The raw conversion rate may not increase sometimes, however, the average value order could increase and that would be counted as a positive bonus.
The conclusion!
It is now time to see if all the work has been beneficial for you. Before checking if your hypothesis was successful, you need to make sure that statistically, it is significant. There’s a short definition by Chris Goward which explains the importance and meaning of this.
Many split testing tools can interpret for you if the high point has been reached. It makes it easier for you and you do not need to put in as much hard work. Nonetheless, understanding the existing theory behind it is essential as you can then identify problems if they occur. There are tools you can use to measure how long it can take to reach statistical significance, Evan has a tool concerning this and it can help you determine how to order value will differ across test groups that are different.
If your hypothesis was correct and your process was a success with increased conversion then that is great. Next, you will need to look at how the implementation process will roll out to the website. This would mean that you exclude trying out Optimizely or Visual Website Optimizer to display results to visitors. At some point, you will need to hire developers and ask them to make changes, until then you can send 100% of your traffic to the perfect design.
This is also a likely scenario and you may not hear conversion rate experts talk about their failures. Peep Laja talked about this in his article in detail through his case study where he stated how it took 6 tests to finally reach a successful result.
The necessary bit is to keep trying and learn something from the process. Failed tests will always teach you something in the process, you can iterate them and note down all your important points for the future. Lastly, keeping track and saving all the data in an orderly way to use in the future is important as well. A log should be maintained for all tests.
That is about all of the details you need to know! Conversion rate optimization is an ongoing process and there are always details you will need to enhance and learn from. A good eye will learn to see opportunities to test all the relevant aspects. Following a good process can help you make a massive impact; you need to be thorough and careful. Now that you are aware of the CRO process, would you like to know what it costs?
The percentage of the people that visit a page and perform their desired action is known as the conversion rate.
To calculate the conversion rate, one divides the number of conversions by the number of people who visit that page. For example, if you run a beauty products company and in a month, it receives 200 visitors with 100 sales.
The conversion rate will be 100 divided by 200, which is 50%.
It is okay if you want to increase your conversion rate but you shouldn’t make it your priority. Primarily, because conversion is just a part of the entire process, not the whole process.
For example, if you run an e-business of highly luxurious leather jackets each of which is $500 USD, the conversion rate will only be 5% for this business.
Now, if you produce the same products with much cheaper goods, let’s say, each jacket is now for $10. You apply the same concept of conversion rate.
Seeing the relatively cheaper price of the products, people may purchase more. The conversion rate will be higher in this regard and it can be as much as 100%. Because of much affordable price, everybody can buy this product whenever they visit your online store.
Now, multiply 100 with $10, you will earn $1,000.
This means that you earned less even though the conversion rate was much higher.
Therefore, it is better to focus on the revenue generation rather than focusing solely on the conversion rate. It is nice to increase your conversion rate but this shouldn’t be your ONLY goal.
As a client, you can do a lot to increase the conversation rate. But most of the people don’t know how to start or what to do. Most of the work depends upon two primary things – data and common sense. When I talk about data, I mean gathering the information regarding the blockages in your marketing funnel. On the other hand, common sense refers to the ways to get rid of these blockages.
It’s quite easy once you get the hang of it, trust me.
But, for your ease, I can provide you with several hints. Let’s start with some mistakes that most small and sometimes, even bigger companies commit.
In today’s times, most companies are still operating with prehistoric and ancient website systems. These systems have extremely outdated UX structures which makes the website too complex to understand. Surely, the owners of these websites weren’t aware of the big role played by the structure of the websites.
This can all be explained by one example – the whole process of ordering. This process can be divided into several steps such as the configuration of the product, inserting name, surname, address, and contact information (phone number and your email).
Now, if we switch some of the steps, for example, put the contact details first. What difference will it make?
The first and the most important difference will be that you will be getting more leads.
The second impact will be that you can pinpoint that person who hasn’t completed the entire purchasing process. You can send them a reminder with a catchy phrase such as “your items are still waiting for you”.
There are also some e-shops that utilize time-limited reminders. For example, you can send a reminder to your customers saying, “Hurry up! You’ve only got 24 hours to keep your items. Finish up your order before it’s given away.” Imagine, if you want to buy PlayStation 5, I’ll suggest you to finish your order as soon as possible because many people want it.
We have many indecisive people amongst us. Most of them will reconsider their purchase, leave in the middle of the order, or some will not return at all. In these matters, filling out the contact details first will give you a chance to persuade them to buy your products. You can approach them through their contact details and provide various incentives such as special discounts, remarketing campaigns, etc.
Other than that, you can avoid asking/using special characters such as slash “/” or dash “-” because most of the people don’t know how to type it or even locate it on the keyboard.
Adding such characters can make you lose up to 20% of the customers, saying that they will do it later but they never get back.
Do you remember the last time you ordered something from a website like a regular customer – from start to finish? When you had to fill out all the details necessary to complete the purchasing process? If your answer is “I don’t remember” then I guess, you need to work on this part.
There are several things that can go wrong during the ordering process. Some errors and critical bugs may show up that can hinder your conversion funnel.
To get rid of this problem, you must regularly test your site on your personal computer and mobile devices using various browsers. You can check Google Analytics to understand what kind of browsers your users use the most.
Plus, once you go through your website like an ordinary customer, you will definitely see some of the areas that need immediate improvement.
Another most important thing in a company is its blogs. A lot of money and time is invested by the companies into building good quality content and blog posts. But their prime focus remains on increasing the number of visitors instead of transferring their traffic into leads.
To increase your conversion rate, you can start by adding CTA’s into your blogs in the form of old-fashioned text links. If you want to gain more attention from your visitors, you can also highlight these links. But before going on with this hack, you need to test its working and answer some questions such as what kind of color contrast is the most eye-catching? Where it should be placed in the blog post to enhance CTA performance?
This is the spot where text links of CTA will work much better than the CTA images.
This is because many people turn a blind eye to all the images present in the content. They’ll skip through them without batting an eye because they’ll think that it’s one of those galling advertisements, even I would skip that part. Any information written on those images can go to waste.
Now, when it comes to the text links, they don’t hinder the reading of the readers. Instead, these text links seem like a header that sparks up the interest of the readers and they’ll read much more carefully.
We can take the example of HubSpot when they experimented with the CTA banners and text links to see the increase in the conversion rate in the blog posts. The results suggested that only 6% of the leads were generated by the CTA banners present at the end of the blog while the bigger percentage (93%) is generated by the text links.
It is quite surprising that some solutions can be right under your nose but you just can’t seem to pick up. For instance, you have a business of selling computers with a drawn-out warranty. The only setback here is the CTA button is not visible to the users.
This problem can be resolved by highlighting the CTA button. There can be various ways of emphasizing it such as enlarging it, utilizing good color contrast, or even by making several but cleaner graphics around this button. It can help to boost up your sales, resulting in increased revenue.
When it comes to CTAs, it is best that you opt for buttons instead of images or texts because people are quite used to looking and clicking on buttons. If you put images or texts and ask them to click on them, they will get confused and they will leave your website. So, it is better if you work with the traditional-looking buttons.
Some of the businesses generate revenue from taking calls. In that case, you can make your company’s phone number bigger and clickable. An increased convenience can result in increased revenue.
If you want to increase your sales, instead of posting sign ups or buy signs, you can post the benefits of your products. Try telling your users what you have in store for them and how it can benefit them.
Stop highlighting the things or facts that your users already know. Describe the positive consequences of buying your products and services.
Blank texts are quite boring and your users can lose interest. So, you should go with some visually formatted texts such as in the form of videos.
If you’re offering a good deal, people will never want to miss it, especially where there is a lot of fuss created over the internet.
So, if you want your customers to make quick decisions, you can always tap their fears by placing a countdown on the offer.
Plus, if you’re running an e-business, you can always perk up your customer’s interests by making a product prominent. You can do this by highlighting it as the “Deal of the Day” or “Buy one get two free”, etc.
Need professional assistance for Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)? Then you can email me at info@krcmic.com, call at +420 722 829 579 or use the form below. Would you like to expand your business network? Then don't forget to follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
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