How to improve conversion rate? Here are 9 suggestions for you!

A design change can increase website click-through rate by 192% and conversion rate by 27% - is it possible? Hubspot’s test proves: It’s possible! This is the charm of " Conversation Rate Optimization" (CRO), which reduces customer acquisition costs by optimizing the conversion process. But, where should we start to make such a "miracle" happen?

Today, we bring you 9 thoughts and tips on CRO provided by conversion rate optimization experts. They look surprisingly simple, but they have been proven in practice and over time, and may bring a "192% up" change to your product/website in the next second.

Tip 1: One campaign, one page ( Oli Gardner , co-founder of Unbounce )

It seems like common sense to design a dedicated page for each event, but how many people actually follow it? Because there are too many activities or they are held frequently, adhering to the traditional working principle of "making full use of existing materials", you decide to keep the design unchanged and only modify the copy .

The result is that the copy and design become separated from each other, or the copy loses its own style in order to fit the fixed page design.

Oli Gardner, co-founder of Unbounce, points out that you need to design a page specifically for each campaign. And the order must be: 1. Write down your event copy first; 2. Use design to fully visualize the copy.

Don’t put all your hopes on the design just because “a picture is worth a thousand words”. Before asking the designer to come up with an attractive page, tell him what those thousand words are!

Tip 2: Message Matching ( Ryan Engley , Director of Customer Success at Unbox )

There are more and more channels for paid advertising, but would you believe it? 98% of them are wasted.

For example, open your Baidu promotion background and ask yourself these questions:

• Do your keywords match your landing page 100%?
• Does your creative copy match your landing page content 100%?
• Even more, does your landing page title match your landing page content 100%?

Many operators may break out in cold sweats. So at least, as a first step, please maximize the matching degree involved in these three questions, so that people who come to your website following keywords or advertisements do not feel deceived. You know, information matching is the most powerful weapon to improve conversion rate because it allows people to confirm that they have come to the right place.

Tip 3: Stop writing copy. Steal it. ( Joanna Wiebe , Copyhackers writer)

A little tip for copywriters/ content managers : When you don’t know what to write to impress your clients, why not try using their own language?

After all, the purpose of copywriting is to touch the hearts of customers. If you can't be a worm in the customer's stomach, then being the customer itself is not bad. As Joanna Wiebe of Copyhackers says, don’t write copy, steal it—steal it from your potential customers, from their website comments, from their blog reviews! Those words are full of emotions, hit the pain points directly, are original and easy to resonate with. Joanna once “stole” a sentence from a customer review and used it on a registration button, which increased conversion rates by 400%.

Tip 4: If the client says TL;DR , make it shorter ( Georgina Laudi , VP of Marketing at Unbounce )

You can often see comments like this on American forums : TL;DR. It seems cool when you first see it, but if you knew what it meant, you might want to cry.

TL;DR is actually the abbreviation of "Too long, didn't read", which means "too long, didn't read" in Chinese. This kind of customer response is most likely to occur when we do email marketing . Too many words? Don’t watch; more than two screens? Don’t watch!

Unbounce Marketing VP suggests treating EDM like a landing page: one email, one goal. Just provide enough information for the person receiving the email to click on the link. Not more, not less.

Tip 5: Review copywriting with a fixed process ( Georgina Laudi , VP of Marketing at Unbounce )

Repeated revisions and opinions from too many people may affect the speed of optimization, and an incomplete review mechanism may also easily affect the quality. Georgiana Laudi, VP of Marketing at Unbound, recommends developing a fixed process for copy review. The principles can be summarized into the following three points:

• When reviewing, two (or more, but not too many) people are better than one;
• These questions must be confirmed: Is the text clear? Is it actionable? Is it bright enough? Does it sound consistent with the brand style?
• Finally, even if the copy is provided by the boss, you cannot agree to it without principles.

Tip 6: Don’t change your target customers easily ( Oli Gardner, co-founder of Unbouce)

Whether it is the quantity or the quality of customers that determines the optimization direction of the product/website. Obviously, in most cases, quality should be king. And once you’ve made up your mind, don’t change it.

“When designing customer experience, are we targeting ideal customers or just existing customers? We once set two relatively cheap charging standards, which attracted a large number of junior market operators or people who didn’t know much about operations. Although the number of customers increased, it brought a great burden to the operation and maintenance support of the product. After raising the price, we retained more ideal customers - they are more professional and have sufficient budgets, and we can also serve them better.”

Tip #7: What your landing page should include ( Ryan Engley, Director of Customer Success at Unbounce )

Telling a story requires cause and effect, and expressing a point of view requires three arguments to support it. Although your website needs many landing pages, don’t rush to write them. Each landing page should contain the following five parts:

• Product image
• Title and subtitle
• Features and benefits
• Social proof/celebrity endorsement
• Call to Action

If five is too many, then there are at least three of the following:

• Call to Action
• Title and subtitle
• A video that includes product image, features/benefits, social proof, etc.

Tip 8: A/B test as much as possible ( Peep Laja , founder of ConversationXL )

Conversion rate optimization requires a lot of A/B testing. After all, if you want to optimize your product/website to the greatest extent, you should not only understand why users stay, but also why they leave.

However, according to a 2016 report by ConversationXL, an agency focused on conversion rate optimization, most companies conduct less than 5 A/B tests per month, 43% of companies only conduct 1-2 tests per month, and less than 1% of companies conduct more than 20 tests per month.

Test as much as you can, advises Peep Laja, founder of ConversationXL. This suggestion is not groundless. Twitter resumed user growth after increasing its testing frequency from a few times every few months to at least 10 times a week. GrowthHacker.com also used a test plan of three times a week during its bottleneck period to keep its growth rate increasing. Of course, testing is not the goal, it is just the beginning; the purpose is to optimize and achieve improvement based on the data feedback obtained from the test.

Tip 9: Open your mind and try different changes ( Ginne Mineo , Hubspot author)

You may be very familiar with your product/website and think that there must be nothing wrong with the practices of certain benchmark products/star websites. However, some changes can still be made to try new growth points.

Hubspot once conducted a test in which they removed the full-bar call to action button at the bottom of the webpage and replaced it with a slide-in design. When the scroll bar on the right disappeared, which means that about 2/3 of the entire webpage had been read, the call to action button would appear.

The slide-in call to action button actually increased the click-through rate by 192% and the conversion rate by 27%. It seems that many people still have a visual blind spot about the bottom bar - how would you know if you don’t try it?

CRO : There are a hundred projects but only one mission

Now, if you want to take the first step in CRO, there should be a lot of things you can do. However, the suggestions provided by experts are just scattered points of knowledge. If you want to connect them together, you still need continuous attempts and sorting.

Interestingly, you may already be doing CRO, but not doing it specifically or systematically. ConversationXL surveyed 722 people who work in conversion rate optimization in 2016 and found that each company had a different division and definition of this work. They were given various titles, such as:

Data analyst , conversion rate specialist, conversion rate expert / consultant / strategist, optimization director, marketing director, digital market analyst, growth hacker , marketing manager, UX analyst, product manager ...

It can be seen that today, people working as CROs are likely to hold other positions; they may also be set other additional goals in addition to optimizing conversion rates. For example, the main job of a company’s marketing director is to optimize conversion rates, but at the same time, because of the title of marketing director, he is also responsible for customer acquisition and retention , as well as various online and offline activities . However, we still believe that CRO is a job that requires concentration, focus, and effort. And while this work has a variety of names, it has only one mission, which, as Peep Laja put it: focus on data-driven growth.

There are two reasons for this:

• The conversion rate itself is reflected by data, so the occurrence of optimization actions and result feedback are driven by data;
• In the process of conversion rate optimization, it is necessary to continuously conduct a large number of A/B tests, then conduct quantitative and qualitative analysis, propose hypotheses, and conduct experiments. After obtaining the results, we will then proceed with the process of analysis - hypothesis - experiment. Therefore, data is indispensable in the optimization process.

It can be said that data is indispensable from the beginning, process to the restart of optimization. However, without real-time, complete and objective data, none of this would be possible.

I believe that every operator has a large amount of data in his hands, from website logs, Baidu search , Baidu statistics, online customer service, WeChat public account background, etc. However, they either lie in the system background in the form of reports, unable to be easily retrieved and flexibly analyzed; or they need to be exported every seven days, otherwise they will be lost forever in the vast background data and will never be recovered.

A dedicated operator needs to log in to at least 5 platforms every day, internalize the various forms of reports provided by each platform into conclusions, and adjust the work accordingly;

More ambitious operators will further explore the relationship between platforms, integrate data from various sources, find internal connections, and look for unexpected growth clues.

However, if there are no suitable tools , relying solely on manpower to carry out the above work will take a lot of time and energy, and it will basically have nothing to do with the vision of "frequent testing, real-time analysis, and rapid adjustment." You can use third-party data analysis platforms on the market, such as DataView, to turn CRO from theory into reality.

In the future, when everything is cloud-based, data will become a byproduct of survival like carbon dioxide. Every position will be given the attribute of "operation", and every work goal will be inseparable from the action of "optimization". This is a prediction from the data perspective. And we are ready.

“Stop worrying about what a good conversion rate is. Start working to improve your existing conversion rate.”

The author of this article @Peep Laja was compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

Product promotion services: APP promotion services, advertising platform, Longyou Games