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Implementing, monitoring and optimising website conversion performance should be the bread and butter of marketers, but due to varying pressures of the role many top marketers can be left in the dark with regards to the best tactics and solutions to implement. Budgets are getting squeezed and while advancements have helped solidify the role of digital in the marketing mix, more marketers are quickly discovering that increased web traffic is pointless unless those new customers are actually converting. As a result, it seems the solutions that guarantee performance and an increased ROI are the conversion rate optimisation methods fuelled by data and smart insights.
Sydney−based ANZ MD of global conversion rate optimisation (CRO) and tech firm Ve, Ashley Wales−Brown, said it's vital to look at what percentage of your marketing budget is currently being spent on actually converting customers once they arrive.
“We find that it’s when we ask this question to clients they suddenly come alive and start to question everything,” Wales-Brown said. He said that while traffic arrives, there's then a “significant drop off” in the actual number of converters.
Key pointers
- Marketers first need to look at what percentage of their budget is going on CRO and get a deep understanding of onsite customer behaviour.
- Low conversion rates should not be accepted as standard. Those who don’t are at the forefront of CRO adoption and are the ones gaining the competitive edge.
- Clear business goals must be established to measure the different stages of the customer journey as well as employing the right resources to ensure onsite changes can be executed regularly and quickly to measure and improve results.
- CRO strategies vary from using a combination of changes to your website content, structure and layout as well as third-party plugins and email.
- Aside from actual website changes, common CRO techniques include offers; increasing urgency; email or display remarketing/retargeting; save and send basket techniques; targeted messaging to keep customers engaged; real-time relevant content and products; browsing and comparing options and reducing clicks to purchase.
- Not considering the full path to purchase is a CRO pitfall. It’s easy to get fixated on one element and neglect the rest, but each stage of the journey has to be tracked and optimised to ensure best results.
In a nutshell
When marketing teams spend so much time, effort and money growing the brand, finding and engaging new customers and bringing them to the site, it is essential that the maximum number of customers complete their purchase. A solid conversion rate optimisation (CRO) strategy will result in maximising revenue from website traffic.
Want to know more? Visit Veinteractive.com.
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