In the Web Marketing Hemispheres you have traffic in one hemisphere and conversions in the other. You work hard to get traffic to your website. CRO is the science and art of generating more actions and revenue from that traffic.
A properly applied CRO campaign - especially where no testing has been done previously - typically lifts revenue per visitor by 30% to 200%! That's why it's one of the highest ROI activities you can engage in.
Many marketers and business owners look to implement "best practices" in order to lift revenue per visitor. The problem is your customers and your unique offering are often different in significant ways. At Best Worlds we have spent many years implementing changes asked for by clients to follow best practices in the hopes of improving conversion. Unfortunately many of those changes had no measurable impact on the revenue per visitor.
Because they weren't addressing the most critical factors influencing the choices of THEIR particular visitors. So how do we know which factors are having the biggest influence?
A great place to start is a model for visualizing these critical factors created by Wider Funnel.
The model shows that the vehicle that provides the potential for the Conversion Rate is the Value Proposition, making it the most important of the six conversion factors. The other five factors are either conversion drivers or inhibitors.
Does the landing page relate to what the visitor thought they were going to see?
The Relevance of the value proposition and context of the source media is critical. Your page must use terms your visitor relates to and be consistent with the incoming link or your visitor will be disoriented and leave the page.
Does the landing page clearly articulate the value proposition and call-to-action?
Clarity is the most common of the six that we find marketers struggling with. The two aspects of Clarity that must be analyzed are Design and Content. Designing for Clarity creates an unimpeded "eyeflow". Content clarity ensures the images and text combine to minimize comprehension time.
Is there an indication that the action needs to be taken now?
Urgency has two components: Internal (or how the visitor is feeling upon arrival) and External (or influences the marketer can introduce to the visitor). While Internal Urgency is generally pre-existing when the visitor arrives on the page, the tone of the presentation, offers and deadlines can all influence External Urgency.
What are potential misgivings the visitor could have about undertaking the conversion action?
Anxiety is a function of the Credibility you have built with the visitor and the Trust you are asking them to have.
Are there items on the page that could divert the visitor away the from the goal?
The more visual inputs and action options your visitors has to process, the less likely they are to make a conversion decision. Minimizing distractions like unnecessary product options, links and extraneous information will increase the conversion rate.
The answer is YOU DON'T ...until you start testing.
Yes, best practices can be a great place to start, but only after a solid theory has been presented about what is influencing your particular visitors or customers the most (your customer theory).
Our trained CRO experts with lots of testing experience can get lifts right out of the gate, but the biggest improvements typically come AFTER the initial round of tests. Why? Because we can start to identify the factors that appear to be having the biggest impact on conversion and then focus our suite of CRO techniques on THOSE factors. It's not enough to ask users what they want or think, you have to see what they actually DO.
When you do that in the context of a customer theory, every test is valuable - whether it lifts conversion or not. Because eventually you will validate what you think you know about your visitors, and with a validated customer theory you will be able to focus on the factors that truly are having the most impact on conversion.
If you haven't done any testing, you can expect improvements of 30% - 200% in your revenue per visitor within the first few months of implementing a conversion rate optimization campaign.
If you are paying for traffic or getting a good share of organic traffic and you are not testing for CRO, then you are leaving money on the table.
Once your testing machine and process are in place, the amount of effort required to keep learning and improving each month becomes quite minimal, and at that point these efforts are by far the highest yielding ROI for your marketing efforts.
