“No results are ever gained in digital marketing without a conversion” (CrazyEgg).

It is often said that it is easier to build your digital success by optimising your conversion rate. But so often, marketers are scratching their heads and still getting it wrong. In fact “Only 22% of businesses are happy with their conversion rates” (econsultancy). Optimising your site and converting the interested visitor into a customer is the critical result that marketers are seeking.

Having good conversion rate optimisation (CRO) means that you can lower your customer acquisition costs and get more value from existing visitors. However, there is always room for improvement: even the best converting websites are constantly being updated and improved to further optimise conversions. We have been discussing the top 5 things that marketers need to know about CRO in order to be successful.

 

1. The first step to improving CRO
2.  

A business is built around conversions. Accurately measuring conversion rates on your pages to decipher which pages are performing successfully is crucial. However, the common rule “if it's not broken, don't fix it!” also applies to CRO. If conversions are successful on particular landing pages, then don’t change it.

How do we know if a landing page is converting well? Firstly, marketers need to establish their own definition of conversion. Is it simply someone landing on a page? Is it someone purchasing? Is it the number of clicks? Or is it perhaps customer satisfaction rates?

The truth is that it doesn’t matter what your definition of conversion is. As long as you focus directly on one metric to be able to establish a comparison, you’ll be able to track improvement in your results.

Is there too much data nowadays?

The short answer is that there can never be too much data, as you can never do enough testing to find the optimum way to make your customer tick. It’s what you do with the data that is key. Many companies are just simply measuring the wrong data, or don’t know what to do with the data they are collecting. Google are the top trumps of testing, running on average 7,000 A/B tests per landing page (the average company only runs 5).

Although it would be impossible for most companies to run 7,000 tests, many could benefit from running multiple variations of the same tests and cross referencing their data to get more accurate and reliable results. All tests should be validated with both quantitative and qualitative data to completely verify what customers are thinking and what they are doing. Better yet, a customer emotion test should be conducted to see the true extent of a customer's journey throughout their digital experience. (read more)

A concerning trend in today's digital world, especially when collecting data from customers, is cognitive bias. This systematic error is where participants maladapt their thinking strategies which in turn affects decisions and judgments. Especially in today’s digital world people are increasingly trying to skew their emotions to what they think they should be feeling. For example, they may focus solely on the price of a brand’s product rather than the brand itself.

 

The most important metric is…

All data metrics are important but Customer Experience is of utmost importance . ‘60% of marketers are now seeing the importance of analysing the customer journey to improve conversion rates’, (Marketing Charts.)

Being able to understand the customer is the first priority when increasing conversion rates: if you don’t know what your customers want, then how are you ever going to make them convert? Many marketers are so focused on adapting their website functionalities that they forget about the customer.

Improving customer experience and user experience will naturally increase your conversion rates. For example, personalising the online experience for a customer by changing certain elements of the site to respond to their location, device or demographic will mean that they are more likely to stay on the site for longer. Currently, 59% of marketers are failing to personalise content to the consumer. This could be your first step to increasing CRO. (Smart insights)

 

Consumer behaviour has changed

Consumer behaviour is continually changing, and this brings marketers new challenges and opportunities. Consumers are now more demanding and by just analysing conversion rates you are not getting a full overview of the customer. What time of the day do they interact? What’s their preferred method of interaction? How long did it take them to make the first purchase?

Conversion rates need to be fully analysed through paid media to be able to paint a full picture of their behaviours.

Watch out for this top trend in 2020..

Only 2% of traffic converts after their first visit.

Understanding your customers’ emotional reactions to your site, as well as personalising the content they see, will in most cases result in an instant increase in conversion rates. At the very least, understanding customers’ emotions will provide deep insight into why they are not converting.

User experience (UX) research has provided an opportunity for marketers to gather qualitative data to understand human behaviour and how people interact online. UX research will uncover the insights that are critical to successful design, customer satisfaction and ROI. Carrying out UX research on your brand and customers will help you to decide which designs, decisions and campaigns are going to lead to an improved customer conversion rate.

In summary 

Marketers often feel in the dark about CRO and don’t know where to start. CRO is a time consuming process which could significantly increase the growth of your business. CRO has developed dramatically in recent years and now takes a much more customer-centric approach. With the ability to provide marketers with actionable insights through both quantitative and qualitative analysis.
So what simple tasks could you start today that will make an impact tomorrow?
There are many elements that could be impacting your conversion rates, such as not having engaging content or a functional website. So start by running A/B tests on your content to see how changing it will effectively increase your CRO. This will lead to you being able to understand your customers on a deeper, more emotional level. Once you can do this you can start to create in depth customer journeys which will further enhance your user experience.

But most importantly establishing a consistent plan which is manageable through the resources you have available and delivers the results you are wanting is the first step to improving your CRO strategy. There is no point creating a complex CRO plan when you do not have the time or money to implement it.

Pomegranate is launching a new way to learn about what your customers really think and feel when interacting with your digital experience. Our emotional testing Lab enables us to extensively test the obstacles, barriers and of course the opportunities that determine the direction of your optimisation strategy, and avoids any cognitive bias. Read more.