Conversion Rate Optimization for Desired Business Outcomes

Every website and business owner ultimately wants more leads, more conversions, more sales, and more profit. Every senior executive is constantly challenged by their CEO or by their board of directors to move the needle and make more money. Middle management feels the pressure from above to deliver higher performance at a faster pace while reducing spend. Associates across every organization are tasked with the day-to-day responsibilities of showing growth and contributing to the bottom line. Typically, someone along the way will ask the ever-important question of “how”. If no one at your organization has asked, or if it’s not clear how to pursue increased revenue, then the contents of this web page could go a long way toward the success of your company’s efforts - not to mention your own career aspirations.

Conversion rate optimization is not just for online shopping cart funnels. It’s a framework for businesses of all shapes and sizes to key in on what the ultimate purpose of the business is, how to maximize marketing spend, how to properly structure a test and interpret its results, how to evaluate your competitive landscape and how to deliver actionable recommendations and insights. While conversion rate optimization may have started out as a term used to describe increasing your landing page performance metrics, it is more over-arching and all-encompassing as we quickly approach the 2030’s. Teams who focus on optimizing their conversion rate in a structured way will quickly outpace their competitors who are still winging it or still relying on what has worked back in the 1970’s or 80’s.

A Framework For Successful Conversion Rate Optimization:

Working with a trusted analytics and business intelligence partner, who can demonstrate cost savings and incremental lift, will be immensely valuable in your organization’s journey to conversion rate optimization glory. Many parts of our framework require deep expertise and advanced knowledge to execute and interpret accurately. As you read on, evaluate which pieces of the framework your team can manage today, and which pieces you might need professional guidance with.

A. The Definition of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Conversion rate optimization is a framework for optimizing business outcomes and improving performance. Thoughtful customer research, thorough market analysis, carefully-executed A/B tests and deep data analysis are all core components of CRO. On your website, this could very well mean improving your landing page performance as we mentioned earlier, but should also entail your shopping cart flow, UI/UX research, voice-of-customer surveys and questionnaire response analysis, testing of marketing or promotional offers, and improvements to your sales and operations process.

CRO is also a framework for optimization for mobile app developers, SaaS-based organizations focused on subscriptions and feature adoption, non-for-profits looking to increase average donation values, and agency partners looking to better serve their clientele

B. The Nucleus of Conversion Rate Optimization

The organizations who are constantly improving their customer experiences online and in-person will have a large edge on organizations who don’t in their quest for conversion rate optimization. Organizations that share the following traits tend to succeed over their competition:

• Executive Buy-In: Senior executives and decision-makers who champion conversion rate optimization and empower their team to do the same are at a major advantage versus those who don’t.

• User-Focused: It’s easy to get into the habit of checking your own site or app, or walking into your own physical store front, in the hopes to share the same experience as your users. However, this is not the same as performing user research and asking your customers what they think, how they feel, analyzing their behaviors and figuring out how your value-proposition and service offering fits into their decision-making process.

• Hypothesis Testing: It’s also very easy to assume that something will work because it’s pretty or because your CFO thinks it’s a good idea. If you’re not conducting hypothesis testing, you’re not getting a read on what is really working. You might get lucky with your landing page or ad unit and it may work great! However, to be able to replicate success, you must test and know how to interpret results.

• Clear Decision Making: Decision-by-committee rarely works in conversion rate optimization. If your organization has multiple points of decision, then decisions are made much slower and sometimes deferred for later. Offering clear analysis and actionable recommendations that are based on the combination of data and experience goes a long way to streamline decision-making to a single team, and sometimes a single individual.

• Continuous Optimization: Most systems in engineering, finance, marketing, and other areas run at peak efficiency and yield repeatable results when performed continuously. Does your team have a CRO subject-matter expert, or a champion for optimization? If not, this person could be you.

C. Opportunities for Conversion Rate Optimization: 

Analytics Metal has helped businesses of all shapes and sizes and across a variety of industries with conversion rate optimization. Here are some of key customer conversion points where we’ve helped our clients succeed:

• Landing Pages: With A/B testing and personalization, you can optimize your conversion rate for specific audience segments, serving them the content or promotional offerings applicable to your acquisition strategy.

• Shopping Cart Funnel: Each step, screen, or stage of your shopping funnel is both an opportunity for conversion rate improvement as well as a chance for your customer to leave and possibly never come back.

• Navigation Menu: When was the last time your web team tested the website navigation menu, sidebar, or sub-menus? What about your mobile app’s menu? How about your physical in-store kiosk navigation? Most companies will answer “never” here, leaving many conversion rate points on the table.

• Time to Close: How many touch points do your marketing and sales team need to acquire a customer? How many steps do you ask your potential new subscribers to take before they subscribe? Can any steps or touch points be refined or removed altogether, and how will your conversion rate be affected?

• Pricing & Discounting: While always taking into account costs, does your organization know its lines of diminishing returns and pricing breakpoints? Have there been optimizations and testing on price points based on region, customer segmentation, or discount thresholds?

• Marketing Strategy: Does your tag line, slogan, call-to-action or value-proposition go through continuous improvement and optimization? When was the last time your team tested into another marketing channel or ad unit type? Marketing efforts should always be tied to performance objectives, and continuously optimized.

Conversion rate optimization involves clear definitions of what success means, data analysis, and a significant amount of hypothesis testing. It can be challenging to both champion optimization internally while trying to execute improvement testing across marketing, the web, and pricing. We have significant experience in CRO and would love to hear from you. What are your challenges in conversion rate optimization? How can we help? Let’s have a conversation to learn more.