Try a combination of the four strategies we discussed in this blog post, to help you find your sweet spot. Planning to increase your advertising budget to give your traffic-generating campaign a much-needed boost? Digital Excellence can help you get the most out of your marketing investment, by identifying any shortcomings in your CRO strategy. Holy Grail or not, your target conversion rate can be within reach.
Let’s chat about getting your CRO fundamentals right.
Many experts have referred to the conversion rate as the Holy Grail of marketing. After all, an e-commerce site can generate hundreds of clicks or attract millions of unique visitors; but if none of these turn into sales, that’s your precious marketing dollars down the drain.
So as a good marketer, you measure, track, and tweak, until you get to a strategy that truly works for you.
These practices and techniques that you leverage, in order to improve the success of your marketing or sales campaign fall under the category of Conversion Rate Optimisation. The CRO process gathers insights into the visitor’s journey: how they come upon your site, what specific steps they take, what drives them – as well as what stops them – from executing on the action you prescribe.
If your business spends huge sums to generate traffic, this guide will help you understand how to craft a CRO strategy that works, in order to get more out of your marketing budget and improve your bottom line.
The Importance of a Well-Aligned CRO Strategy
CRO is all about prioritising customer experience and anticipating their needs and expectations. A business is better able to adapt, when it focuses on how consumers behave and what drives them towards making a purchase. With a CRO strategy in place, an e-commerce company can gain several key benefits:
- Stronger brand image and online reputation
- Boost in number of leads generated
- Improved conversion of those leads into customers
- Increase in annual sales revenue and overall ROI
However, if the strategy is not well-aligned, the business can experience difficulties along the sales funnel.
Head of Funnel Problem
If an issue is left undetected or unaddressed while it’s still at the head of the funnel, it might escalate into a bigger obstacle that will take even more hours, manpower, and dollars to fix.
Head off any problems and nip it in the bud, as soon as it is identified: Did you segment your market correctly? Are your target leads aware of your brand? Are you putting out well-produced content that speaks directly to the needs of your potential customers?
Current Customer Flow
As they say, it is easier and less costly to keep an existing customer than to acquire a new one. You’ve spent your marketing dollars to generate your current customer flow; now, you should have a strategy for retaining them.
Are most of your customers are once-off buyers, who almost never return after making that first purchase? Increase your retention rate, by enticing these casual purchasers with helpful emails. Your goal is not just to remind them to go back to your store; you can just keep in touch with helpful resources to increase your credibility as an expert and go-to resource. Of course, you can also offer timely deals and incentives, but they idea here is to make sure that the next time they want to buy something in your category, your brand will stay on top of mind.
Fresh Customers Flow
Do you have a high volume of traffic to your site, but very few of your visitors are converting? Maybe you need a better understanding of your target market, particularly where they are in the customer lifecycle.
For instance, a new user has just landed on your website. She is unfamiliar with your brand and maybe, she wasn’t really shopping when she came upon your listing. Chances are she is not on your website to buy or at least, not yet. The goal of your CRO strategy in this case is not to hard sell, but to take her to the next stage, wherein she starts to realise that she has a problem – a problem that your product can potentially solve!
Best CRO Practices in 2019
CRO has played a key role in driving the growth of digital companies worldwide. By analysing their conversion rates, businesses can better optimise their marketing strategies and increase their power over the traffic they are getting.
Therefore, a good CRO strategy is one aimed at influencing user behaviour. This can mean optimising a website, in order to deliver a personalised user experience through subtle customer persuasion. These four CRO best practices can help you gain such insights.
Understand visitors using heatmap tools
Heatmap tools can indicate where visitors clicked, hovered over, or stayed for the most time. Marketers can use these to closely observe the activity of the visitors on their landing pages, and from there, take the next steps towards retention.
If you know which parts of your website perform best, try and test different configurations for your customer journey. Perhaps, you can leave cues or crumbs, that can guide them to take the desired action. Insert content in strategic places to engage them and eradicate any obstacle in your customer’s path.
Capture leads via live chat
Without exception, every customer seeks convenience. They go to a website, not to linger or loiter around, but to spend as little time there as possible. They really just want to find what they need and then get out just as quickly.
Instead of letting them wander around, trying to make their way on their own, help them quickly find those answers. A live chat feature is one such solution, as it tremendously cuts down search time. As an added bonus, offline chat is a great way to collect customer emails.
Optimise for different platforms and devices
As any marketer, you always want to have a complete 360-view of the journey of your prospects, from new lead to customer to loyal client returning for more. You can make this path smoother for the customer, by making their entire buying experience throughout all platforms as seamless as possible.
For example, maintain your landing pages across every device type. Whether they access your website using their mobile, tablet, or a desktop, keep your marketing footprint as consistent as possible. Consistency is where retention begins.
A/B test your marketing channels
Try comparing two versions of a landing page. Which one performs better in terms of conversion? One way to test this is by showing two or more variants of the page at random to website users. You can then employ statistical techniques to determine which variation of the page gets more conversions.
On the surface, this might seem like a costly idea; but there are now inexpensive ways to do it. Also consider the payoff for A/B Testing: It has been proven to generate up to 40% more leads for B2B platforms, and 25% more leads for e-commerce websites.
Try a combination of the four strategies we discussed in this blog post, to help you find your sweet spot. Planning to increase your advertising budget to give your traffic-generating campaign a much-needed boost? Digital Excellence can help you get the most out of your marketing investment, by identifying any shortcomings in your CRO strategy. Holy Grail or not, your target conversion rate can be within reach.
Let’s chat about getting your CRO fundamentals right.