Use our conversion optimization guide for beginners to improve and improve and improve your website’s performance and push your limits even further.

“To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.” said the great Winston Churchill. But simply changing is not enough. When optimizing websites you need to know you’re changing in the right direction. You want to be using a data-driven growth strategy instead of just guessing. The following article is meant to provide you with an actionable conversion optimization guide, including the absolute must-dos in any conversion rate optimization process, to help you in achieving your initial CRO goals yourself.

A Full On Paradigm Shift

The user experience you provide your users acts as your website’s business model. You wouldn’t start a business or make changes to your business model based on intuition alone, and it’s time you take this approach and apply it to your online assets. This is conversion rate optimization, a long term, ongoing strategic process of optimizing every aspect of your website, not just to better suite your users’ needs, but with the specific aim of improving your business’ performance.

This process is one that requires investing both time and money. If you’re hesitant, you can start small and expand once you start seeing results. If you’re just starting out, and you follow our lead, you’ll see how beneficial this practice can be. While there are “no silver bullets,” our years of collective experience at Conversioner have lead us to come up with these simple steps, to get your DIY CRO project not only up and running, but showing results.

Web analytics guru Avinash Kaushik writes about the lean analytics cycle: Metrics>Hypothesis>Experiment>Act as seen in the figure below. We’ll break it down for you and incorporate actionable and informative tips and resources.

Track, Set Goals & Start your Analysis

Before you can even think about running a/b tests, you need to make sure that you know what you’re looking at. This means, properly setting up your Google Analytics account, defining your goals and searching for potential leaks in your funnel. To some, finding the problem can be every bit as challenging as finding the right solution.

If you think that this is just a preliminary step that you can skip with no harm done, think again. Any resource you put into better understanding your Analytics in early stages will come back to you ten fold in later steps.

After you’ve chosen your Key Performance Indicators and defined your Google Analytics goals, it’s time to start putting them to good use and find some leaks. Depending on how much traffic your website gets you’ll need to give it some time to accumulate data from your new goals. Once a few days have gone by, checkout these four critical reports, your top sources for leaks:

1. Landing pages/Exit pages – This report let’s you see how your different pages perform. find the ones that are underperforming and start asking yourself, WHY? (we’ll get to that later)

2. Devices – In addition to looking at per page performance, you need to also look for cross website performance for different audiences. Don’t be surprised to see that your mobile conversion rates are lower than the desktop’s, but see if there are any specific devices underperforming. If you find that on iPhone 5 your conversion rates are way lower, be sure to check for specific functionality or design bugs that are hurting your conversion rates.

3. Browsers – Here you can see how your website is performing on different browsers and browser versions. For more checkout Douglas’s #1 insight on his post on how sports tactics can increase conversion rate.

4. Traffic Sources – Different audiences react differently to your content. Use this report to see how users from Facebook convert differently from users from organic or paid search. In later steps you can optimize your content according to this report and fit it to your users’ needs.

Dig Deeper

Now that you have a basic understanding of how users interact with you website, it’s time you find the right place to start your optimization before coming up with a plan for the changes that you think can improve your conversion rates.

For the first part, we recommend starting with a page that is as high up in your funnel as possible – a landing page – where you can make an impact on your entire funnel. Whether it’s your homepage or a dedicated landing page for a specific traffic source, you need to make sure that this page gets sufficient traffic. Running a/b tests with less than a hundred sessions a day can be both excruciating and ineffective. Check out Talia’s elaborate posts on Getting started with landing page optimization and The 5 key elements for landing page optimization.

Before you jump to conclusion about your pages, and this is crucial to the whole process, it’s important that you base your decisions on data and not on intuition. To do that you’ll need to go a little deeper in your analysis, utilizing the capabilities of User behavior analysis tools. This will allow you to come up with hypotheses or at the very least back up your intuition with data before taking tests live.

Hypothesize

This is the fun part. Based on the two previous steps you can now come up with the brilliant ideas that will literally make you more money. Most optimizers just play around with elements on their page, changing the color of the call to action button or the copy of the title, and that’s ok. But if you really want to see your conversion rates climb, you need to start using emotional triggers, testing holistic and strategic hypothesis and not just elements. Tapping into the psychological process your users undergo are your real key to success.

For additional inspiration checkout our recent landing page critiques that incorporate suggestions for tests that are varied in type and scope:

• 10 Landing Pages Examples to Increase Sales

• 15 landing pages examples and what you can learn from them

Pick a tool, setup and start testing your hypothesis

Think you know what you need to do to increase your conversion rate? Great! It’s testing time. Pick an a/b testing tool that has a “What You See Is What You Get” editor that will allow you to create a variation of you original page, changing just the elements you want to test. These tools have come a long way over the years and are very intuitive, pretty easy to use and offer great support and whole communities of users.

Make sure that you measure the effect of your changes across your entire funnel. Don’t settle for measuring CTR; remember the goal here, you want to see the effect on your revenue. After a day or two you can usually tell if you have something wrong in the setup but only after a minimum of two weeks you can start relying on the trend that you’re seeing, and only once you’ve reached statistical significance can you announce a winning variation.

*When you setup your first test, remember: forms and checkout processes have backend implications that require your tech team’s attention, so unless you’re doing this as part of an official project with allocated resources, we recommend sticking to landing pages.

Repeat and Expand

Running a successful a/b test does not mean having a successful conversion optimization process. For that you need to really commit yourself to learning, analyzing and optimizing your website by running test cycles on different part of you funnel. Furthermore, for us at Conversioner the steps listed above are a first measure, aimed at generating knowledge and insights before diving into a much deeper analysis of site-specific audiences and emotional triggers. We don’t believe in just testing elements on pages; we test strategies and in return we see much greater increases in conversion rates.

Have a Question?

Having a great product with fantastic features and competitive pricing is great.

But customers don’t care about you, how successful you are, your features or even what you’re selling. Customers care about themselves, and what’s in it for them. In fact, the majority of customers don’t remember where they bought a product or how much it cost; what they do remember is the experience. Building a conversion optimization strategy is all about the customer and how they see your product.

This is one of my favorite images by ‘User Onboard,’ describing what every business in the world sells:

There are probably dozens of companies out there selling the same as you, with cheaper or more expensive pricing, and better or worse features; so what do you offer that’s different? How do you change your customer’s life?

Getting Big Wins With Conversion Optimization

Conversion optimization isn’t just about the numbers. In fact focusing on numbers only will not give you those big wins you read about in blog posts. Conversion optimization is about careful planning, strategy, assumptions and hard work. It’s about learning who your customers are, their story and applying what you’ve learned throughout the entire business, from customer support to sales and marketing, essentially helping you create a better product for your customers.

Effective conversion optimization efforts are built on a conversion optimization strategy; they are data-driven but most importantly they are customer-centered. To really grow a business and benefit from “CRO” you have to view it as a journey, not a result.

These are 3 questions marketers or business owners should answer every day.

3 Questions You Should Answer Every Day:

#1 Who is my customer?

Segmentation is a technical way of showing site visitors specific information according to their online behavior – according to gender, geographical location, the browser they’re using and other behavioral elements.

In 2011 Urban Outfitter’s head of marketing decided to optimize the site’s product displays to match a user’s gender thinking it would increase conversions. This meant women would only see clothes for women and men would only see clothes for men. It backfired as many women were shopping for men’s clothes and vice versa making it an irrelevant segmentation.

There are many good ways to segment traffic according to behavioral elements but another element that marketers don’t put enough emphasis on is the emotional element.

This may sound trivial but how many of you have a detailed portfolio of your customer? I’m not referring just to their technical information but to actual information like

• What they do for a living
• What their daily routine looks like
• What makes them happy
• What disappoints them

By identifying your customer’s profile and understanding who they are you will able to create better experiences online and help visitors become customers. Ask yourself who your customer is everyday and remind yourself that they’re more than just statistics; there are people behind those screens.

Continue reading about this topic:

1. Why A/B test aren’t driving the results you want
2. 5 psychological triggers that impact your customers

#2 Why Do People Want My Product?

“A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Steve Jobs

People buy products or services based on their emotions and then justify their purchases with logical explanations.

To create a better user journey you have to start by understanding the desired result customers have while purchasing your product. Then you need to dig deeper to understand why they want this outcome. Once you understand the emotional reason behind your customer’s purchase, you will be able to provide that to them right within the purchasing funnel.

People mainly buy stuff to either gain pleasure or avoid pain. Whether it’s to replace a product they own, highlight their self-esteem or feel better about themselves, all purchases have an emotional reason behind them and it’s crucial to identify what triggers these emotions.

When it comes down to it, “people don’t buy products they buy better versions of themselves”. When selling your product, are you still describing yourself? Or the person your customer wants to be?

Continue reading about this topic:

1. How buyers make decisions
2. 10 psychological triggers that affect purchasing

Some Great Examples Of Companies Focusing On The “Why”

MyHeritage:

Though they may need to start testing their form, their messaging focuses on the customer’s need for preservation and avoidance of losing precious memories and history. The messaging gives potential customers the sense of security, trust and connection with the past.

Evernote:

“Your Life’s Work”.

You are at the center of attention; Evernote is everything you need it to be.

Products as multipurpose as Evernote face many strategic issues regarding their messaging – most companies try to list all of their features and options on their landing page to “grab” as many prospects as possible.

By focusing on the emotional side and the “What’s in it for me” element Evernote have stepped out of the “features” race.

#3 What is my customer’s story?

At the end of the day you’re communicating and dealing with people. At the heart of your business, you solve problems for your customers, create new dreams, and help people become better versions of themselves. To do that you need to understand your customer’s story and tell that story.

Every story has a hero – an everyday character faced with a challenge and a solution. Your product helps this main character discover within himself the greatness of his own power. This is your customer’s story; in this story you aren’t the hero, your customer is. Your business helps your hero solve her challenges on her own, essentially making her a better hero.

Each story has a moral to it, and focuses on certain values – Your hero connects with those values, tying them into their deepest desires. This means you stop talking about how great you are, and show your audience how great they can be.

Stories are a powerful way of building a relationship with your customers and connecting them to your brand. But your story isn’t about what you want to tell customers, it’s about your customer’s stories. Understanding your customer’s story will align your entire team and improve all communications within and without.

Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg’s book ‘Buyer Legends’ is a fantastic guide for creating these stories and getting your team on board.

Back to the Basics:

As companies hire more analysts, focus on user behavior, introduce technical tools and automate their marketing efforts, the importance of connecting to your customer has never been more relevant or important.

Tools and platforms are a great way to create better products or services and put yourself out there. But if you don’t connect with your customers to the point that you know who they are, what they do and what makes them get up in the morning, you never will get those big wins you read about. Big wins and case studies come from carefully creating a strategy, knowing your customers and giving them what they want, not what you want.

Ask yourself and your team these questions every morning, and most importantly, be able to answer them.

 

Conversion optimization isn’t just about the color or size of a button. Knowing that your call to action button works better when it’s green and not red is nice, but what can you really learn from it? How can you harness that information to a much wider marketing strategy?

Optimizing is about testing strategies and tactics. A conversion strategy is about testing theories according to your audience & your data. The results will help you understand your customers better, your messaging and design and only then will you be able to scale down to the position of a call to action button or an image on your home page.

Having a great looking website that attracts returning visitors is really nice but it doesn’t necessarily reflect your revenue and vice versa. Frequent visits alone don’t turn into revenue unless you actually “convert” them to buying from you. In order for these visits to show in revenue (may it be downloads, signups or purchases), you need to start working on your conversion optimization strategy as a whole and not as little items that need fixing.

Picture this:

Think of your website as a magazine. It has all the stories inside and a lot of people are looking at it, but no one is actually buying it. Since your magazine is attractive, and has plenty of text you are sure that sooner or later someone will bring it to the counter and pay for it but that rarely happens. So, what will make your magazine appealing enough for people to purchase it? Changing its color might work, maybe adding an image, but which kind of picture and what color should you choose? You need a strategy.

 

The 3 elements of a conversion optimization strategy

Before setting out to build your website optimization strategy, define your goals. Remember to create a clear distinction between your end goal (purchase, phone call or a meeting) and the micro-goals that initiate them (whitepaper download, reading more than 2 pages on the site, subscribing to a mailing list etc.).

Once you’ve chosen your goals you will need to decide where to start your conversion rate optimization efforts, to do so make sure you follow these 3 metrics.

 

Content

It takes more than a simple test to create web content users connect with. There are many fantastic articles written about building a successful content strategy but the key for creating great content is about knowing who your clients are, what they are looking for and what emotional triggers to use to motivate them to your goal. Valuable content such as e-books, case studies, blog posts and client testimonials, creates trust, and helps push clients further down the conversion funnel. Remember that content has its place, do not overflow your landing pages with content and if needed place it below the fold.

The landing page

You have less than 2.5 (usually there should be a link for stats source) seconds to convince visitors to stay on your page. The landing page is the biggest part of your conversion optimization efforts. This is the page expected to turn a visitor into a sales lead. As discussed above, your landing page should be based your users needs, not what you think is nice or what you want to market. Check out this step-by-step guide to creating landing pages that convert. The most common conversion optimization tests; test the title of the page, a button, a certain color or an image, these are just results of the strategy. When creating your conversion optimization strategy think about exactly that, strategy. Check out these two landing pages we created for emaze which are completely different from one another but were made to test an entire strategy. Later on we scaled down to the more technical stuff as buttons and colors.

Continuity

To get the full value of a conversion optimization test requires a commitment to ongoing testing and strategy analysis. Don’t expect amazing results in the first round; conversion optimization is an going process and the more you build for the long run, the more conclusive your results will be and the more you’ll learn. The name of the game is – modularity. Test one strategy at a time, test one part of the funnel at a time and make your way up or down the funnel in a way that will allow for significant data. There’s much to learn from a test that doesn’t succeed and often these are the tests that teach us the most. Don’t stop your test too early; get as much significant results as possible so you can plan ahead.

Don’t forget:

Take your time in building your conversion optimization strategy. Consider your goals, your audience and what they want. Brainstorm with your team and don’t be afraid to use professionals to help and increase your conversion rate.

How do you build your strategy?