How to improve traffic conversion rate?

"Traffic anxiety" seems to make everyone pay too much attention to how to tap into traffic depressions, gain greater exposure for their own brands, and drive traffic to their own stores, while forgetting one very important thing: how to improve traffic conversion rate .

In actual operation, we have seen too many cases of "high traffic, low conversion ", for example: a live broadcast with 1 million views, but the actual number of orders is in the single digit; the effect delivery brings in hundreds of thousands of UVs into the store, but the conversion amount is less than a few thousand; the brand advertisement has tens of millions of exposures, but the actual registration rate is a few thousandths...

All of these tell us one thing: simply having large exposure and large traffic is sometimes not enough. For example, even if some advertisements reach us dozens of times, we will not buy them. Because its content is problematic in terms of prompting us to make a purchase or take other further actions.

So, in this article, let’s talk about how to improve the conversion rate of traffic through content. The focus is on sharing the five major issues that must be addressed in content dissemination in order to maximize traffic and sales.

1. Cognitive question: What do you do?

Solving this problem is crucial for some new categories/brands. Because if you can't let others understand what you do, no matter how much exposure you get, it's useless.

Let me share a real case I encountered:

A brand that provides door-to-door pest control services found us with a clear goal: to acquire customers. The demand is also very clear: to carry out large-scale online performance advertising. This client probably read a lot of books like "Growth Hacker" and believed that brands should use performance marketing to build their own traffic pool, and then use the fission mechanism to quickly acquire new customers, instead of spending a lot of money on brand marketing as before.

It sounds like it makes sense, right? But after careful analysis, we felt that it was not appropriate to start with performance advertising. The reason is: not only is no one aware of this door-to-door pest control service brand, but door-to-door pest control itself is also a very new service, and users do not have this awareness in their minds. In this case, if you just put up some DSP banners that flash by, will anyone know what they are? Will anyone order it? Even if they order, will they still place the order?

What this brand needs to do now is not to "win by quantity" advertising, but to introduce itself through some channels that can carry content : I provide door-to-door pest control services, and what services can I provide you. We can also use the door-to-door cleaning service, which everyone already has an understanding of at the time, as an analogy to make it easier for everyone to accept this new service. It would be best if the content can be easy to understand. Once your target audience understands what you do, they will be interested in reading your follow-up information.

Here I would also like to talk about the phenomenon that some small brands always want to learn marketing from big brands.

Seeing that Apple and Nike often produce advertisements that touch upon sentiments, values, and social emotions, and don’t even have any brand logos, I think this is really great content. So, I followed suit and made a similar one, and the result was predictable. Little do they know that Apple and Nike have already established brand image associations through extensive communication, while these small brands have not even established the most basic awareness of "who you are". Therefore, we still have to work hard to carry out cognitive education.

2. Motivation question: Why should I buy you?

Once the user knows who you are, the next step is to stimulate his motivation and tell him: Why should he buy from you?

To solve this problem, we can roughly consider two situations: one is products with relatively low decision-making costs, and the other is naturally those products that require high decision-making costs.

For products with low decision-making costs , such as snacks, daily necessities, clothing, etc., discount information can stimulate users' purchasing motivation. For example: 618 is coming soon, and when you are browsing the web, a message suddenly pops up saying "50% off on all items of certain paper towels". You think that your home paper towels are about to run out, so there is a high probability that you will follow the guidance of this advertisement to enter the store, and see that there is really such a promotion, so you will place an order without hesitation.

Of course, with promotional information from major brands flying all over the place, consumers’ thresholds are getting higher and higher. If your promotional offer is not as big as "50% off all items", then you need to add some gimmicks to the promotional information to make consumers feel that this promotional information is not a universal benefit for everyone, but a discount that can only be obtained through their own efforts. After all, discounts that are easily obtained are not "attractive". For example, I saw that gxg.jeans had an early promotional idea called "Free of charge if it rains", which successfully stimulated the consumption motivation of many consumers. A similar case is what Vatti did, “Free meal if France wins.”

Next, let’s talk about how to motivate users for products with high decision-making costs. First, let us clarify a definition. The so-called high decision-making cost is a relative concept. It does not necessarily refer to products that are very expensive in themselves. It may also refer to products whose prices are higher than we previously knew, such as a bottle of laundry detergent for 200 yuan.

For products with high decision-making costs, the key to stimulating user motivation is to make users focus on themselves before focusing on the product - realizing that there was some irrationality in their past behavior, and thus eager to solve it by purchasing the product.

For example, if you want to motivate users to buy a bottle of laundry detergent that costs 200 yuan, don't start by talking about how good the product itself is. Instead, tell users: You wear clothes that cost thousands or tens of thousands of yuan, so you shouldn't use only ordinary laundry detergent worth dozens of yuan to wash them.

Taking real estate as an example, there was an estate called "Lakeside at Discovery Bay" in the early days of Hong Kong. Its biggest advantage was the very good environment and the facilities inside were very suitable for living, but they faced two biggest problems: one was that the economy in Hong Kong was in recession at the time. Although everyone planned to buy a house, they all took a wait-and-see attitude; the other was that the transportation in this place was not very convenient, and people usually had to travel by boat.

Faced with this situation, how can we motivate users?

Through research on potential consumers, we found that in the eyes of those who want to buy a house but are still on the sidelines, everything can wait, but there is one thing that cannot wait, and that is their children’s childhood: the closest period of time between parents and children is only these few years of childhood, because everyone knows that when children reach middle school, they will naturally begin to become alienated from their parents and live their own lives. The childhood years should be cherished and not missed.

Because "children's childhood only lasts a few years", transportation may be a little inconvenient, but we should still give children the best childhood and the best growth environment. The advantage of "Discovery Bay is still lakeside" is naturally self-evident. So they launched the communication point of "Childhood is short, give it the best now", and finally successfully stimulated the purchasing motivation of target users.

3. Trust issue: Why should I trust you?

Don’t underestimate the trust issue. Many cases of “large traffic and low conversion” fail because users fail to trust you, especially for products with high decision-making costs. For example, financial lending brands do not have the "cognitive problems" and "motivational problems" mentioned above. At this time, the key to improving conversion rates through advertising is to make users believe that your platform is reliable and trustworthy.

So, how can we dispel users’ doubts and build trust with the brand? Here are three methods:

The first one is called "promise + fulfillment + case" , which is a technique to build a slight trust with users. "Promise" is easy to understand. I believe that no matter you are browsing online stores or offline stores, you have seen merchants' promise words such as "10 times compensation for fake products", "authenticity guarantee", "effects in 7 days", etc. But unfortunately, few consumers believe these words easily after seeing them. This requires adding the words “fulfillment” and “case” in the second half of the sentence.

Fulfillment means that the brand proactively provides users with a method to fulfill its promise, such as "ten times the compensation if the product is fake". If the consumer finds that the product they receive is a fake, what can they do? The process can be listed as "1, 2, 3..." to make consumers feel at ease.

In addition, you need to add success stories at the end. For example, if it is "effective in 7 days", you can put pictures of real consumers experiencing the product for 7 days on the page, or preferably a video, so that consumers can see with their own eyes the real and effective changes brought about by using the product.

The second method is called trust transfer . The so-called "trust transfer" is to transfer those things that come with trust to your brand and products. Common ones include endorsements from industry experts, relevant qualification certificates, celebrity endorsements, authoritative media reports, brand history, number of users, etc.

The third method is called testimonial review . The biggest difference between so-called "testimony" and "endorsement" is that it focuses on the authenticity of the content. It can be simply understood as the user's feelings after actually experiencing the product. What we often call "content seeding" is actually a similar mechanism.

You can refer to my article "When we talk about content planting, what exactly are we planting? 》A point was made in the article, “Never use celebrities as spokespersons.” Just like the traditional way of brands inviting celebrities to endorse products, they will shoot beautiful product posters or TVCs. The correct way to use the product planting is to let celebrities truly experience the product, and then inadvertently post it like posting daily life photos, such as posting a photo of their outfit for an event on Weibo, or posting a photo of themselves applying a facial mask after work late at night, etc. It is best to make sure there are no traces of advertising. Someone may ask, how can we let users know that these celebrities are using our products? Next, use top and mid-level KOLs to spread the word that this product is the same one as a celebrity, and finally use anchors to reap the profits. The trust that is invisibly established with users is the most powerful.

4. Threshold question: Can I try it first?

The reason why products with high decision-making costs often make users think again and again, so that simply exposing them to a large amount of information is difficult to have an effect, is that they often have a very high behavioral threshold - the decisions users need to make are too important.

For example, an advertising poster for English training directly encourages users to scan a code and pay for registration after watching the ad. This is obviously too demanding, and people cannot take such a big action simply by watching an ad.

Therefore, since the motivation of advertising is limited and cannot make users make such a big decision, it is necessary to lower the behavioral threshold - let advertising prompt users to take a small action.

For example, in English training advertisements, instead of encouraging users to pay for registration, it is much easier to showcase the teacher advantages and teaching methods of the training brand, and then guide users to participate in a trial class or follow a public account.

After all, it is easier to see an attractive advertisement and then go to a trial lecture. The huge behavioral threshold will result in a very low conversion rate for ads no matter how much exposure is increased.

Therefore, you can find ways to lower the user's behavioral threshold, such as:

Encourage users to try out the product instead of buying it (for example, all car ads encourage users to test drive the product instead of directly encouraging them to place an order);

Encourage users to go to another of your marketing activities (such as the training course trial mentioned above);

Encourage users to try your free product first (e.g. advertise to get users to follow your official account);

Reduce the user's regret cost (set a regret period after purchase, etc.)

These methods can lower the behavioral threshold and amplify the effectiveness of advertising.

5. Pressing Question: Why should I buy now?

In my previous work, I often received feedback from customers: your copy is not call for action enough. The so-called “call for action” is the final problem we want to solve: tell consumers why they should place an order now?

This is because, for many non-essential products, even if the advertisement motivates the user, he may forget about placing an order while browsing the web page. Therefore, at this time, there needs to be a strong enough signal to allow users to place an order immediately after reading it.

This powerful signal is to create scarcity . Whether this scarcity exists in the objective world or is deliberately created by others, once scarcity occurs, people will feel a sense of urgency. This sense of urgency will prompt people to place an order immediately.

For example: when we buy things online, we first look slowly at the search results, but when you see a certain product is labeled "only 2 left" or "only 5 left" by the system, you will click on it to take a look; for example, why Starbucks' cat claw cup and Uniqlo's KWAS co-branded T-shirts are so popular that people line up to buy them, it's because they are scarce.

Therefore, when promoting products or services, you must constantly present scarcity. Scarcity can manifest itself in many ways, such as:

Only when you meet XX (time/location/specific group of people, etc.) conditions can you enjoy XX discount

Only the first XX people can enjoy XX discount

For every XX people placing an order, the price will increase by XX yuan

…

Summarize

If you invest a lot of traffic but your sales are still not going up, you might as well stop and think about whether there are the following five major problems in the dissemination of content that have not been solved:

1. Cognitive question: What do you do?

2. Motivation question: Why should I buy you?

3. Trust issue: Why should I trust you?

4. Threshold question: Can I try it first?

5. Pressing Question: Why should I buy now?

Author: Pulang

Source: Planner2333