Digital Marketing Optimisation: Part 3 - Conversion

Last time in this series on digital marketing optimisation I looked at the process of campaign optimisation. But as the saying goes: “You can lead the horse to water, but you can’t make it drink”. Whilst your efforts make people aware of your brand and to give them a compelling reason to visit might be fully tuned, it’s what happens when they get to the site that makes the difference between online success and failure. So today, let’s take a look at conversion optimisation.

To start of let’s be clear about what we mean by conversion optimisation. To be more precise what do we mean by conversion? To optimise effectively you need to optimise some defined outcome and it’s important to clear about what the desired outcome is. For example, if you have a site where people can either complete the transaction online or pick up the phone and call the call centre, which one of those outcomes do you want to optimise? It may not be possible to optimise both. If you optimise the site to increase the online bookings you may find that the process doesn’t work for those people who prefer to research online but transact over the phone. If you optimise the site to generate call centre volume, it may mean that you have to incur extra costs in the call centre to deal with the extra demand. So, clarity of purpose is an important ingredient in the conversion optimisation process.

The conversion process is not one process; it’s a series of mini-conversion processes. Each of these processes needs to be optimised. You need to chunk the problem into bits. What is right for you will depend on your site and what you are trying to achieve. Fairly generically, the main micro-processes are: Land, Browse/Search, Engage/Transact. Part of the analytical approach to conversion optimisation is to identify where it hurts most. Which part of the conversion process seems to be causing the most problems? However, this also has to be balanced against the “ability to execute”. Which parts of the website can you change or impact in which timescales? It may be that the checkout process is identified as requiring optimisation and tuning but it may be that it will take 3 months before you can get the development resource to make the changes. In the meantime you be able to change some other parts of the site more tactically.

In an ideal world it would be great it is was possible to make changes to all parts of the site with relative ease and to measure the changes to get to the optimal result. There are technologies and platforms out there that are making this easier to do but in many cases the reality is that real choices need to be made in terms of impact versus time to effect. In these cases my instinct is usually to start at the beginning and look at landing page optimisation. Landing page optimisation is something that increasingly is becoming easier to do and it’s an area where there is always the potential of a high impact.

For me one of the biggest challenges in digital marketing is getting someone to do something twice. A lot of people who visit a website only visit it once, they only look at one page, and they stay for less than a minute. If they buy or transact, they only do it once. So how do you get them to do it twice? Look at that second page? Stay for that second minute? Make that second visit? A lot of subsequent behaviour is determined by the user experience on the first page of the first visit. The first page of the first visit needs to generate the momentum that ultimately leads to a successful outcome.

The growth of testing and experiment systems such as those provided by brands such as Optimost and Offermatica have made page optimisation processes a lot easier. They enable some of the hurdles associated with enacting change to be overcome and provide a systematic way to understand how to improve con version. They are not the only tool in the toolbox and conversion optimisation is an area where a wide array of data and services can be used in a holistic way to understand and optimise the user experience. Good site analytics gives an insight into the effectiveness of the micro-conversion processes, surveys help you understand the level of satisfaction with the user experience and usability testing tells you (warts and all) what processes works, which ones don’t and why.

Having gone through the process of acquiring prospects and converting them into customers, do you want to go through the pain and cost of doing it all again? I thought not. Next time we’ll take a look at the process of managing your investments in acquisition and conversion through optimising your retention marketing processes.

Till then…

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