It’s surprising how many companies in South Africa are not yet clued up with what they should really be doing online. Apart from everyone jumping into bed with social media, SEO and PPC experts to get as much traffic to their website as possible, they forget about the last crucial step in their online marketing strategy: turning visitors into sales. I’m not saying that it’s not important to get high quality traffic to your site, but what are those visitors doing when they get there? Does their visit turn into a lead or sale? Are they doing what you actually want them to do? It’s pointless spending all that money if you haven’t thought about the end goal – selling your product.
Understanding your current situation
Let’s assume you’re a marketing manager of a big brand in South Africa and your company website does fairly well. By “fairly well” I mean your website ranks somewhere on the first page of Google and the quality of traffic you are receiving is resulting in around a 30% bounce rate (visitors who arrive, view one page and leave). Let’s assume that for every 100 visitors to your site, you get around three to five leads. That, Mr Marketing Manager, is substandard. Your website has the potential to reach a conversion rate of up to 20%, so why are you faffing around at 3% to 5%? The opportunity cost is clearly a bit high – I’ll show you how to fix that.
Identifying your goals and getting to grips with the basics
As with every strategy, you need to define a set of goals. However, with conversion optimisation, a “goal” represents a specific action you want users to perform on your site, such as filling in an enquiry form or downloading a brochure. Create a list of the pages that you consider a “conversion”.
For most companies, getting an enquiry through their website can be valuable and can be considered a conversion or goal. On average, every 10 leads should equate to one sale. This is dependent on a number of factors such as your industry, competition, the nature of your product, etc. Along with your list of “conversion” pages, try attributing values to these goals. For example, if your product sells for R1 000 and it takes you 10 leads to make a sale, your value for that goal should be R100. This will help you with reporting and allows you to work backwards to find out which channels produced the most return on investment.
Creating a strategy to reach your goals
At this point it’s important to take note of a few metrics and their meanings before continuing.
- Conversion rate: The total number of conversions divided by the total number of visitors.
- Cost per lead: The total cost of the specific campaign divided by the total number of conversions.
- Landing pages/Pre-sale pages: These are the pages that are instrumental in producing your conversions. Pages such as the “Contact Us” or “Product” page can be considered landing pages.
Conversion optimisation (which is what you are embarking on) is the process of increasing your conversion rate and subsequently reducing your cost per lead, thereby increasing your return on investment. As fancy as that sounds, it’s really all about common sense and a ton of testing. With the right tools and insight, you can radically improve conversion optimisation.
Most of your strategy should be focused around creating alternative “pre-sale” pages in order to test the effect on your conversion rate. These landing pages need to contain high quality, relevant and well-thought out content and media. The calls-to-action on these pages need to be prominent and produce somewhat intuitive reactions from the user. They need to know what to do next.
Further reading: Smashing Magazine’s article on The Ultimate Guide To A/B Testing by Paras Chopra
There is a vast number of resources online that suggest best practices when it comes to creating landing pages for your products. All of these resources are based on elements that help increase your conversion rate. I’ll be discussing these elements in greater detail in the upcoming weeks. For now, I have listed them with brief descriptions of each.
- Trust: Does your landing page contain elements of trust? If your visitors are making an online purchase, do you have an SSL certificate? If you do, show them that you do with a badge.
- Intuitiveness: Do your users intuitively know what to do next? I.e. is your call-to-action prominent and part of the natural flow of the webpage?
- Imagery: Using the correct images and media plays a major role in conveying your brand message, and how many of your users convert into leads or sales.
- Content: Is your content of high quality?
- Calls-to-action: Do you have too many calls-to-action?
- Layout: Testing different layouts may lead to higher conversion rates.
- Incentives: Are you incentivising your calls-to-action? E.g. free shipping.
- Congruency (core value proposition): Is the content on your website all delivering the same message without conflict?
- Page load speed: Is your excessive page load time tampering with your conversion rate?
These are nine of the many elements that could increase (or decrease) your conversion rate. Finding the right balance between these elements is the key. The only way you’re going to do that is by testing, testing and more testing. You may end up blue in the face, but your ROI will breaking through the clouds.
Further reading: Kiss Metric’s article on 10 Little Known Factors that Affect Your Conversion Rate
Tracking and measuring your results
It’s pointless being gung-ho about strategy and then sitting back and hoping for the best. Every scientist needs to track and measure their progress in order to prove their theories. Similarly, there are a number of great tools to use to track and measure your conversions within your website. The three tools I have listed below can help you create the foundation for a winning formula. Used correctly, these tools give extremely insightful information that can help you increase your conversion rate from 3% to over 10% in a matter of weeks. Gets you excited doesn’t it?
Google Analytics
Used to measure traffic, visitor behaviour and to set up goals so that you can track which marketing channels are producing the most ROI.
ClickTale
This essential tool allows you to record mouse movement, mouse clicks and more. It aggregates all your visitors’ behaviour and supplies you with amazingly insightful reports allowing you to make informed decisions regarding your landing pages and website. My personal favourite functionality is that it allows you to playback visitors’ mouse recordings.
Google Website Optimizer
Google Website Optimizer allows you to test various landing pages against each other and provides you with a report on which variation is performing the best.
Further reading:
Creating a site conversion optimisation strategy by Smart Insights
You’re Only as Good as Your Last Conversion Rate by Unbounce
7 Tips to Convert a Click into a Sale by ClickMaven
Resources
Google Analytics – track visitor traffic, behaviour and ROI
Google Website Optimizer – Measure effectiveness of various landing pages
ClickTale – Track mouse movements, clicks and visitor behaviour
ABtests – Library of different theories that have been tested