If your business is struggling to compete online, it might have less
to do with your competitive landscape than with your conversion
optimization program.
The simple fact is that many companies can — and do — impede their
website optimization efforts by having information silos, territorial
teams, groups with tactical mindsets, aversion to change, and an
unproductive focus on vanity metrics.
All of the above derail progress even before you factor in other
companies who may have better or more mature conversion practices than
your own.
Sound familiar? Here are five tips for tackling these internal conversion killers.
Tip 1: Start Small
People are afraid of change. Business organizations are no different.
There’s a good chance that you’ll encounter some resistance while
trying to implement your conversion rate optimization (CRO) program.
Dealing with internal politics can be stressful, so it’s a good idea to
have a plan for handling these challenges early on.
If you’re just starting out, it’s often best to keep your CRO
initiatives small. This way, you won’t attract too much attention and
won’t be too dependent on outside support. For instance, you can focus
on testing and tuning unimportant landing pages first (e.g. a landing
page from one of your marketing campaigns) and slowly build your case
towards the more important, high-traffic ones.
The key here is to appear as non-threatening as possible. The last
thing you want is to attract the attention of risk-averse constituents
in your organization and get your project shot down (or shut down)
before you have a chance to prove its merits.
Departmental silos and territorial thinking are among the biggest
obstacles you’ll face in the course of moving your optimization projects
forward. Conversion rate optimization requires a lot of teamwork, often
from people who have disparate orientations and agendas. Even if you
start out as one-person program, you’ll find that the future success and
continuity of your program depends on getting more people on board,
especially since the resources you need might be in another department.
By keeping your projects small at first, you can get things done with
minimal help from designers or IT folks. Use these opportunities to
make enough gains to help persuade the naysayers to support your
efforts.
If you want your CRO program to move forward, minimize its scope and
concentrate on demonstrating its value to the company. You can always
increase the scope of your program when you’ve gained wider support.
Tip 2: Expand KPIs Beyond “Traditional” Conversions
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are metrics which let you know how near or far you are from achieving certain business goals.
Of course, one of the most valid KPIs for evaluating your marketing
strategy is your conversion rate. But it shouldn’t be the only one you
should be monitoring. It might be paradoxical, but the easiest way to
fail in conversion rate optimization is to obsess over your conversions.
Taken as a single metric, your conversion rate won’t tell you about
visitor intent, where people get stuck, or why users drop off without
converting. Worse, if you have a high enough conversion rate, you can be
misled into thinking that your website (or any of your channels, for
that matter) is doing well even if your revenues are actually stagnant
or down.
After all, you can just as easily increase your conversion rate by
eliminating all non-converting traffic or drastically cutting down
prices. Both are legitimate ways to boost your conversions, but they’re
also not very smart.
If you want your optimization program to succeed, then learn to see
how CRO fits into the big picture. And the only way to do that is to use
metrics that matter to your business. If you’re an e-commerce retailer,
for instance, you’d want to know the effect of your optimization
activities on average order value and how many times a customer
purchases from you. Or, if you’re in B2B, you might want to track
conversions side by side with lead quality or the length of your buying
cycle.
The key here is to focus on KPIs that are tied to profit
improvements. This way, you’re not only bringing tangible benefits to
your company, you’re also strengthening the financial case for
conversion rate optimization in your organization.
Tip 3: Review Your Entire Funnel
Another downside to focusing just on conversions — and thinking of
only purchases or leads as conversions — is that it’s a great way to
chase obsolescence over time.
The top of the funnel matters. Sure, many of the people who visit
your site to get a specific question answered will not become leads, and
they will not become customers. But providing meaningful answers to
people in that stage gives you a shot at getting remembered when the
time comes that the visitor gets past the research stage and is ready to
buy something.
PDF downloads, time spent on page or time spent reading for
informational pages, blog visits – these are all things that you should
pay attention to even if your calls-to-action, your lead forms, or your
shopping cart were not necessarily in play.
Each part of the funnel has a different strategy attached – the top
of the funnel may be search engine optimization and partner sites heavy,
the middle of the funnel may involve keeping your promises upstream,
and the bottom of the funnel can involve forms that do not ask for the
world in return for a PDF, or a cart that people can understand and
operate without giving them the urge to physically harm their laptops.
Each part of the funnel will require a different tactic, and a different success metric.
Tip 4: Know Your Tools & Tactics
It’s entirely possible to have a sound strategy but to fail at the
tactical level. Companies with successful CRO programs have a knack for
selecting and using the best possible tools to support their efforts.
If one of your objectives is to identify the sources of friction on
your site, then your tactics could include primary user research and
usability testing. If your objective is finding out what elements in
your site attract visitor attention, then you’ll need the help of
heatmaps and other visual analysis tools. Your tactics would vary
depending on the objectives of your program (and, of course, your
available resources).
The use of heatmaps like this one created by AttentionWizard is a
good tactic for learning about visitor attention on your site.
In order to choose the right tactic, it’s imperative that you learn
the strengths and limitations of the activities and tools at your
disposal. Usability and accessibility testing, for instance, is very
useful in uncovering the myriad of issues that your visitors encounter
on your site; but, they’re not of much help if you’re trying to discover
how you can make your website more persuasive in convincing visitors to
click the buy button.
Likewise, A/B testing can’t give you meaningful results if your
website is making visitors jump through a lot of hoops. Even the most
persuasive copy will fail to move the needle if your site is plagued
with a haphazard information architecture and visitors can’t find what
they need.
So, aside from ensuring that your tactics correspond to specific
objectives in your program, you should make sure that the prioritization
of your activities makes sense. Remember that like most programs, your
conversion rate optimization initiatives operate under certain resource
constraints. It pays to pick the right tactics so you can prioritize
budgetary and time allocations when implementing your program.
Tip 5: Don’t Forget To Monitor & Evaluate For Impact
Monitoring and evaluation activities basically involve checking your
accomplishments against your KPIs. Monitoring helps you learn if your
projects are going as planned, and if not, what difficulties are keeping
you from doing things that need to be done. Regular monitoring
therefore allows you to resolve problems as they arise, change tactics
and direction when necessary, and revise and improve your strategy if it
seems ineffective in attaining a goal.
Evaluations, meanwhile, are valuable sources of information on the
short and long term effects of a CRO program on the organization.
Evaluation activities are done not only to gauge how successful your
program was in achieving the desired outcomes or goals, but also to
identify unintended effects. As such, evaluations often involve looking
at not just the financial outcomes but also the influence of the program
on leadership processes and cultural elements.
Done right, the monitoring and evaluation of your CRO program can
provide lessons for a smoother way of implementing program activities.
More importantly, data from these activities can give you insights on
which tactics were most effective (and which ones were not) in getting
your desired results, which in turn helps you create a better program.
Understanding Your Business
Businesses face different sets of challenges related to conversion
rate optimization. Some of them are benign and easy to work
through – others, well, not so much. It helps to understand early on
which challenges you will be facing, so you can gradually make your CRO
program better.
