Is it possible to somehow increase the revenue on your site or blog to convert more visitors into actual customers by just performing a few tweaks, while not needing to increase your marketing budget or getting more traffic.
Realize how much you could increase your company’s margins and bottom line. The increase in conversions and margins will allow for higher CPC or increased CPM ad spending to acquire new customers, since you know you’ll turn a bigger profit. This is the benefit of optimizing your conversion rates.
If you’ve never looked into tweaking your site’s conversion funnel, then most likely you’re paying more than you need to when it comes to acquiring a customer than you currently are.
Experts in this field claim that there can be up to a 30% percent increase in sales which is common, after properly optimizing your conversion funnel. So imagine the same number of visitors, and by you making a few adjustments on your site, the same visitors will convert better, buy more. Then you could start the process of sending more targeted traffic to your site.
The core idea of conversion optimization is making better usage of the traffic that you’re attracting or paying for. You can begin by looking at the conversion procedure to find where the potential friction points are, which can be removed or improved upon.
You can do so by better engaging with your visitors or by removing the troubling bottlenecks where your customers will stumble and then potentially leave your site.
The most important step is first defining who your ideal model customers are by experiencing your site through their eyes. Once you know who your profile customer is, then you can begin to hypothesize which problems exist and what it would take to solve those issues.
A View Through Your Customers Eyes
Once you have a clear definition of who your core customer is and what they go through, begin creating test scenarios by performing split testing methods by the various tools available on the Web.
What these split testing sites will do is randomly serve up different versions of sales or landing pages which you want to convert better within your conversion funnel. What this does is it allows for you to test out your theories.
After a while, what they’ll do is collect precise data so you can run additional fine tuning tests. You’ll then begin to breakdown what type of changes that your customers are most likely going to respond to, and then your ultimate test design and conversion improves.
Although most of this is specific to your customer, there are also a few basic concepts which are proven that will drive better testing immediately.
Understand The Motivation Of Your Customer
The demographic of every site is different because every product or service is different, so the ideal conversion funnel should be designed to anticipate all of the needs and the challenges of that particular group of visitors.
This so you’ll keep them focused and trained on your goal which is they converting to completing a sales transaction or opt-in. A concept which is known as “User Centered Design” addresses this need, by providing a set of conceptual frameworks for better understanding the customer.
You would do so by first creating a “persona” of your most ideal customer and then defining all of the scenarios, and then using case studies of how the customer would most likely interact with your system.
What this does is it will guide you through the process of digging deeper than you otherwise would have, and as a result sort of what should yield better site design decisions.
This persona concisely defines who and what the typical user is in your particular demographic. What you would include is defining the user’s approximate age, their profession or occupation, needs, and their frustrations.
The next step is creating a set of scenarios which describes their external context profile of this persona. This includes what motivates them to interact with your website.
Paying Attention To The Flow Of The Page
Look for problems when it comes to the flow of your conversion funnel to see whether there’s functional issues or confusion. The best way to find out is by testing it out yourself by sitting down with your ideal customer, and then asking them to navigate through the site.
Make sure that you give them the goal of they purchasing a certain product, and then watch where they get stuck or confused. At times, this could be as simple as an improper buy button placement on the page.
You may also be asking for too much information or they becoming distracted, such as you requiring your users to create an account before they could order your product.
Another roadblock might be not accepting a particular method of payment that’s preferred in your particular target demographic. It might just be a simple matter of convenience, making it easier on the customer. So look for ways on reducing burden, pages and steps in your sales funnel, and then deliver them the “Buy” button as soon as possible.
Another excellent way of identifying flow problems is by using a precise analytics tool to identify potential bottlenecks on your pages. One popular tool is Google Analytics, as you can define conversion funnels which maps the sequence of pages that a customer is intended to flow through.
This begins from the initial landing page right through to the final “Thank You” for purchasing page. By properly tracking as well as visualizing the entire conversion funnel, you can then easily see where you’re losing your visitors at a certain stage of the funnel.
What this can do is help you in figure out which product or sales pages, or interactive events that you should be focusing more on when it comes to optimizing better.