Contents CONTENTS .......................................................................................................................................... 2 INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................ 3 WHAT IS CONVERSION RATE OPTIMISATION? ...................................................................... 3 AREAS OF IMPROVEMENT ............................................................................................................ 3 INTRODUCE ......................................................................................................................................................... 4 INFLUENCE .......................................................................................................................................................... 4 CLOSE ................................................................................................................................................................... 4 RETAIN ................................................................................................................................................................. 4 TIP 1: CULTURE OF DATA COLLECTION ................................................................................... 4 TIP 2: MOTIVATION ........................................................................................................................ 5 TIP 3: VALUE & PERCEIVED VALUE ........................................................................................... 5 TIP 4: FRICTION TO CONVERSIONS ........................................................................................... 5 TIP 5: INCENTIVE ............................................................................................................................. 6 TIP 6: ANXIETY ................................................................................................................................. 6 TIP 7: START TESTING! .................................................................................................................. 7 ABOUT THE AUTHORS: COMPANY PROFILE ........................................................................... 8 MANAGEMENT PROFILE ................................................................................................................ 8
Kings Conversion Conversion Rate Optimisation Specialists
www.conversionkings.com.au Ph. 1300 55 20 99
Introduction Seven Ways to Instantly Increase You Conversion Rates will help you to understand Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) and ways of increasing your Conversion Rate (CR). Throughout the e-‐book explanations will be provided that detail important areas to consider when trying to improve your CR. Examples will be used were possible to further detail why something is or isn’t successful and how it was implemented.
What is Conversion Rate Optimisation? Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) takes existing visitors to a website or web application and finds the optimal conditions for them to achieve a goal. A goal in this case can be anything from visiting a page, starting and submitting a form, adding items to a cart or completing the checkout process. Marketing today can become expensive in creating bigger and better campaigns or by adopting new marketing strategies. CRO improves the value of customers you are already targeting with the added benefit of improving the value of new visitors in the future.
Areas of Improvement To improve CRO there are various points across a user’s journey that can be addressed. Introduce, Influence, Close and Retain groups visitors into a journey. The journey starts at hearing about a service or product (Introduce), you then Influence the customer that you are the right choice and Close them into a sale. Additionally, most businesses want to have customers return to their services or products, this is the Retain stage. At all of these stages there is generally opportunity for improvement for all businesses however, there is generally one area that has the largest room for improvement and should be focused on. Finding which area to focus on comes down to analysing your business and its current performance, customer behaviors and the market you operate in. It is important to find which area will generate the biggest improvement as resources and time are precious and can be scarce. To further explain why finding the right area to improve is important we will use a short example. Imagine that 90% of users visiting your site convert into customers (Close); an exceptional Conversion Rate! In terms of traffic to your site though you only receive 10% of the market traffic (Influence). Your competitors on the other hand convert at 50% and are receiving 90% of the traffic. In the market there are 100 users, so you receive 10 of these users and of those 10 you convert 9. Your competitors however, even though they convert less are generating 90 users to their site; they are converting at 50% which equates to 45 converted users. As you can see this figure is substantially more than those 9 conversions we had for the first business. We can see straight away
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where both businesses potentially have the biggest room for improvement in regards to Influence and Close. Introducing and Retaining customers is important to first generate potential customers and retain converting customers whilst also working to generate brand awareness. A business can become a source of information for a service or product generating customers and a reason to return to the business.
Introduce This area relates to introducing customers to your industry and/or brand. There are many ways to do this, some common examples include; social networks, videos, blogging, Search Engine Optimisation and relevance of your website to the topic or through setting up adverts.
Influence
Influencing customers to impress upon them that your business is the right one essentially increases market traffic to your site. That engagement of traffic is important as it provides the opportunity for more conversions. Similarly to Introduction this can be done in various ways from videos and testimonials to being a market leader in providing information or news.
Close Closing customers that have been introduced and influenced to come to your business is the area that most people want to improve. This section is generally where testing changes on a website occurs and where CRO comes into the mix.
Retain Just as important as Closing customers is Retaining customers and ensuring that they come back to your service again. You’ve gone through the hard yards to capture them in the first place, you now need to ensure they remain a loyal customer by continuing to keep them engaged. A great way to do this is through offers, providing strong support and by ensuring your product or service is always ahead of your competitors.
Tip 1: Culture of Data Collection The first step in planning a great CRO project is to analyse the current performance of your website and market. A business that collects relevant and accurate data is able to create the most effective projects and will see the best and quickest results. Having a culture that promotes data collection and analysis makes it easy for anyone to assess the performance and identify opportunities within a business. The basic tools for data collection for a website are effective event tracking, goals and demographic information, which can be provided by Google Analytics (GA). Customer surveys are a great tool to find qualitative information that will identify opportunities to develop which can’t be identified through data GA provides. Finally heatmapping software to see exactly what is being clicked on a site and what is being overlooked so adjustments can be made accordingly.
Kings Conversion Conversion Rate Optimisation Specialists
www.conversionkings.com.au Ph. 1300 55 20 99
Tip 2: Motivation One important aspect of CRO is to communicate what customers are coming to your site for. A pitfall for businesses is sending out a great promotion or communicating a fantastic offer through their SEO or Email marketing but not effectively showing the offer on their website. An example of this is a company that communicates free delivery in their email marketing and SEO campaign however the offer is not clearly visible on their website. Users are visiting this site with the intention of using the free delivery however it is not clear that it is offered once they get to the site so users are leaving. In this example communicating on the homepage, product page and checkout page that there was Free Delivery dramatically improved CTR and Conversion rate. Essentially it is important to line up campaigns and offers with your websites content.
Tip 3: Value & Perceived Value The value of a product or service can be very different to the perceived value of a product or service. By changing how a product or services value is communicated, it can be perceived as much more. A recent test has shown substantial increases when changing a discounted subscription plan text from “$34.99 a month” to “$34.99 a month. Save 15%”. Visitors see that they are getting 15% more for their money and are more inclined to take advantage of the offer. Similar situations are evident when communicating monthly vs. yearly subscription plans. Communicating that by paying for an entire year saves you a certain amount vs. paying monthly generally sees an increase to yearly subscription conversions. In summary, increasing the perceived value of a product typically has a positive effect on conversions.
Tip 4: Friction to Conversions In a website or web application there can be many inhibiting factors between a user starting a journey to the end result of a goal and a user completing that goal; we call these factors friction points. Friction points can range from poor navigation to excessive options in a form. Examples are unnecessary fields in an order form, poorly placed or unclear buttons, poor instructions and website speed and accessibility. By reducing friction points and creating clear and easy
Kings Conversion Conversion Rate Optimisation Specialists
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processes for users, it will increase the likelihood of them continuing with the engagement and conversions will follow. A recent example of reduction of friction points was moving from a light-‐box based form to a new page on the website. This had an increase of over 50% of users finishing the form. Our reasoning behind the increase was due to users being able to see the entire form and how short it was with the added bonus of being ‘on’ the website which reduced anxiety behind providing personal details.
Tip 5: Incentive Providing incentive can be a great way to increase conversions. Implemented effectively, incentive based tactics will increase motivation for customers to use your service and/or buy a product. Typically, time based offers are one of the most effective incentives that can be implemented. Additionally, two for one offers, money back guarantees or free delivery can also be quite effective when rolled out effectively. More recently, we had a case of communicating free deliveries and no lock in contracts throughout a website which saw an increase in conversions by 100% for both E-‐commerce and service based clients. This large increase in conversion was achieved through tweaking what information was first communicated to users and what was reiterated throughout the user’s journey.
Tip 6: Anxiety Many users when visiting a new site for the first time are wary. Reducing the anxiety users have of providing personal information or payment details is an effective way of increasing goal completions. A few ways to do this can be to communicate associations, partners, trust indicators such as secure PayPal payments available or simply stating that personal details will not be shared. In addition, it’s important to deliver this message tactfully as you don’t want users raising any eyebrows as to “why” you’d need to confirm it’s a secure site. Similarly if a brand is already trusted, then communicating more trust indicators could potentially have the opposite effect and decrease conversions. A situation where trust indicators have improved submissions was for a service based company that is quite new to the industry. By implementing who the new business was associated with and where it was located with images of the physical office we saw an increase of users finishing the enquiry of over 30% which was a great result.
Kings Conversion Conversion Rate Optimisation Specialists
www.conversionkings.com.au Ph. 1300 55 20 99
Tip 7: Start Testing! The best thing for any business is to start testing! There is no definite way to know how users will respond to a change without testing. It is important to ‘test’ as a change can have a negative impact however can still gives valuable insights into your customer base. A great example is from the already discussed anxiety area where it was found that adding trust indicators actually decreased conversions. It was possible to take this data and move on with the idea that the test didn’t work however, instead the test indicated that the brand was already trusted and communicating this to the client provided information that their marketing had been working and users knew about and trusted the brand. It could also be that there are huge opportunities for improvement within the website where a few tweaks and a bit of time can drastically improve conversion rates. To take advantage of these opportunities and see what improvements are really out there start A/B testing your ideas through either purchasing A/B testing software, hiring an agency like Conversion Kings or running data collection through GA and surveys to back-‐up your ideas.
Need more help and want one-‐on-‐one advice? Feel free to reach us at:
Phone: 1300 55 20 99 Author Email: matt@conversionkings.com.au Twitter: @m_hayden Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/matth79
Kings Conversion Conversion Rate Optimisation Specialists
www.conversionkings.com.au Ph. 1300 55 20 99
About the authors: Company Profile Conversion Kings is a Conversion Rate Optimisation Agency that is located in Brisbane. Our mission is to become the most respected CRO Agency based on our results, customer service and overall experience. We are only as good as last month’s performance so we will never lock you into a 12 month contract or make performance increase claims that are not substantiated by statistics or business models.
Management Profile
Kings Conversion Conversion Rate Optimisation Specialists
www.conversionkings.com.au Ph. 1300 55 20 99