Category: Digital Marketing

Categories
Digital Marketing

Conversion Rate Optimization: Signs You’re Doing it Wrong

As a marketer, you no doubt understand that without conversion rate optimization (CRO), you could have all the traffic in the world, and still risk not turning a profit. You probably know the things you should do – various best practices, split-testing – to convince your traffic to convert. You’re likely doing these things, and if you’re not – you should start now. But, if you’re working on CRO and not seeing the results you want, you could be using the wrong approach. Check these signs against your strategy to see if you’re on the right track.

 

You’re Relying Solely on “Best Practices”

CRO best practices often tell you to change the color of your button to make it stand out against the rest of your color scheme. They tell you to focus on drawing attention to the call to action – making it bigger, changing its color, and the like. While it’s true these making these minor tweaks can make a small difference in your conversion rate, they’re not doing anything to remove the larger, actual barriers to conversion.

  • Is your website loading quickly? A one-second delay in page loading time can result in a 7% decrease in conversions. If your website earns 100,000 a day, that delay could cost you $2.5 million annually in lost sales revenue.
  • Do your users trust your website? If you’re not sure, survey them to find out. If the answer is a resounding no, take steps to increase user trust. That’s another piece in and of itself, so I won’t get into it too much here, but you can add customer reviews, add trust symbols – Verisign, press logos, award badges – and make sure your contact information is easy to locate.
  • Are there too many steps in your conversion process? If it takes too long or is too complex, most people won’t go all the way through it. Go through and see if there’s anything you can do to eliminate steps and simplify the overall process.
  • Is your copy confusing? Have someone who’s never read it before read it and see if they understand what you’re trying to say. Better yet if they fit the profile of your ideal customer. Your copy can be long – this post is around the 2,000-word mark – users will scroll and read, if the content is engaging and provides value. If it’s garbage and fluffy, long-form content could be hurting you.
  • Is your call to action still obscured by unnecessary copy, images, and links?
  • Are your tags and AdWords campaigns leading your traffic to believe you offer something you don’t?

 

You’re Not “Friendly” Enough

Are you:

  • Browser Friendly? Are you optimized for the browsers your users are using the most? Check your site in all the main browsers and make sure it’s a stellar arrival for everyone.
  • User Friendly? Is it fast to load? Clear, and easy to understand?
  • Click Friendly? How many clicks does it take to get users where you want them to go? Keep it simple and don’t make them click 75 times.
  • Privacy Friendly? Do what you can to alleviate user fear that their information isn’t secure. Using SSL is a good place to start.
  • Mobile Friendly? Mobile traffic has overtaken desktop traffic, so if your users don’t have a good experience on their smartphones and tablets, you can bet that’s negatively affecting your conversions.
  • Language Friendly? English is not the only language people speak in the United States. In fact, there are more Spanish-speaking internet users in the USA than the entire internet population in the UK. Ignoring this fact could be costing you conversions.
  • Rating and Review Friendly? Do you have a system that allows people to leave ratings and reviews? Are you leaving the negative ones in place, but responding to them to help resolve the issues where possible?
  • Video Friendly? Including a video on your landing page is a good idea, if you use YouTube or a similar platform that doesn’t require the user to install plugins or additional software. The use of video can facilitate an emotional connection that helps drive conversions.

 

You’re Ignoring All Other Metrics

While you definitely what to focus efforts on getting users to convert – that is what CRO is all about – it’s not the only thing that matters. Conversion is a process. It’s up to you to show them the benefits and remove the barriers in the way of them converting, but ultimately they customer is the one who makes the final jump. Not all of them will, and you don’t want all of them to.

You’re not trying to manipulate your audience into purchasing your products and services if they are not right for them. You want to instead convert engaged users who will love what your business has to offer, and then talk about it will their friends. This helps your business grow. If you’re converting any person – you could harm your reputation because you end up with a bunch of unhappy one-off customers who didn’t get their needs met.

So yeah, conversion rate matters, but you should be paying attention to engagement metrics, too. Take a look at the following metrics alongside conversion rates, to get an idea of how engaged your audience is.

  • Visitor Recency: This tells you how long visitors are going between visits.
  • Visitor Loyalty: This tells you how frequently visitors are stopping by.

Don’t be afraid to make use of surveys to get feedback directly from your customers. Look at the satisfaction rates and determine the Net Promoter Score. Simply ask your customers:

On a scale of zero to 10, where zero is not at all, and 10 is definitely, how likely are you to recommend this company to your friends and family?

Anyone who rates from zero to six is considered a detractor. Anyone who rates at a seven or an eight is considered passive – these are the customers who could easily be swayed to either a detractor or a promoter status. The ones who rate you a nine or 10 are your promoters – the ones you definitely want to keep happy.

Now, subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters and you’ll get your net promoter score. It can be anywhere from -100 (if you have nothing but detractors) to 100 (if you have nothing but promoters.)

The NPS will give you an indication of the overall perception of the brand, so it is an important metric. If customer satisfaction is low and you have a low NPS, chances are people aren’t getting good information about your company. This will obviously negatively affect conversion rates, and you’ll need to develop a strategy to address this issue before you can go back to focusing on CRO.

 

You’re Only Focused on Your Landing Page

The landing page matters, but it’s the first step in the conversion process. Your customer’s journey isn’t necessarily linear, and wherever those customers touch on your website as part of conversion, you should be focused. Each touch point is a chance for retargeting.

If your data indicates a high bounce rate rom your landing page, your conversion rate data may be skewed, suggesting that your marketing efforts may not be working as well as you want. This isn’t necessarily the case, because chances are your customers will have multiple points of entry.

There’s no need to push your customers through a landing page that forces them to sign up, then bombard them with exit-intent popups, offer popups and in-your-face calls to action. The reality is, most users will come to your landing page, click away, and then end up back on your blog or home page a week or so later. Working your marketing efforts to include a lot of off site work, too. Users will come to you when they are ready – so trying to stop them from leaving isn’t the answer.

 

You Think It’s All About Keywords

Keywords matter, of course, but it’s not like they used to. Keyword research is getting complex as search engines have shifted to a more natural approach. Now, we’re focused on user intent, rather than throwing basic keywords in there, so you have to take a step back and think about keyword intent, or what it is your audience is looking for.

The keywords you need to use depending on the type of conversion you’re after. Keyword intent can be broken down into basic categories: informational, navigational, and transactional. If you want more mobile searches to find your store, it’s best to use navigational language. If you want more people to download your content, use informational keywords. If you want to increase sales, which is usually the case, you’ll be targeting the transactional search terms.

 

You’ve Replicated a Site You Deem Successful

If you’ve mimicked a successful site in terms of layout, color scheme, and wording, and expect your conversion rate to go up, you could be in for a disappointment. It’s about more than making your website look more modern or cleaner.

The problem with this approach is, you may see an increase or you may not, because this approach isn’t based on data from your audience. If you do see an increase, it’s likely because at some point over the replication, you inadvertently removed at least one barrier to conversion.

If you rip off someone else’s website design, you’re not really accomplishing thing. Your changes are only cosmetic, and that’s only a small part of CRO. These changes don’t address the underlying issues that could be hurting your conversion rate, such as using the wrong keywords, or user concerns about security and privacy.

The only way you can be sure you’re addressing all the barriers to conversion is to rely on what the data shows you – looking at both your website analytics, user testing, and consumer feedback surveys.

 

You’ve Adjusted Your Strategy and Don’t See Results

Okay, so you’ve paid attention to the data and made changes, but you still don’t see the results you’re looking for. CRO isn’t going to happen overnight – and a single change, or even a collection of multiple changes – may not be the full answer.

Give it time. Keep looking at the data and see what it tells you. If ample time has passed and you should have seen results by now, start again. Compare the data from before the changes were made to after the changes were made. It will give you a good idea of where you need to start to get things moving on the right track.

If you’re using split-testing, be sure you’re split-testing one thing at a time since making too many changes at once can make it hard to isolate the change that contributed to the difference in conversion rate.

 

Focus on the User Experience

While the average conversion rate varies depending on industry, the global average conversion rate in the third quarter of 2016 was only 2.50%. That means out of every 1000 shoppers, around 25 of them actually made a purchase. That sounds depressing, but just gives us more reason to focus good CRO. Most websites have conversion rates under 5%, so even a small increase in conversion rate can make a big difference to your profit margins.

If you find you’ve been approaching CRO the wrong way, it’s okay. There’s always time to make it better, one test and implementation at a time. And if after that you’re not seeing results, it’s time to dig deeper to make sure there is nothing else wrong. Refer to the first point about best practices, and go through all of those before you deem your CRO strategy a failure.

Photo credit: iStock

Categories
Digital Marketing

8 Ways to Personalize the User Experience Without Being Creepy

Social network concept with smiling young people holding smart phones in front of big white wall.

Since the average attention span has decreased from 12 to just eight seconds – meaning goldfish now can hold attention longer than we humans can, it’s important to take steps to stand out whenever possible. We’re constantly bombarded with information, especially when we’re online – and to cope with that overload, we process things quickly – sometimes at the expense of making connections with our intended audience. Personalizing user experience, despite how creepy it may seem at first, is one of the most effective ways to make that connection.

Let’s look at the types of personalization you can use, the various ways you can create a tailored user experience, and why you want to integrate personalization into your strategy in 2017 and beyond. Personalizing your web experience can help you see an average of 19% higher sales.

 

Ways to Personalize User Experience

  • Individualized Personalization: In this model, each user has their own unique dashboard or options, based on information available about each person. The computer will generate a model of who is person is, and then present different information for each one. For instance, based on the search and purchased history, the computer may determine that someone’s engaged.
  • Role-Based Personalization: In this model, users are grouped together according to the characteristics they share. Target figured out a teenage girl was pregnant before her own father did – based on her browsing and shopping habits. With customer data, they noticed patterns specific to pregnant women – such as the increased consumption of supplements and lotion. Using the trends, they were able to start sending coupons to women throughout various stages of pregnancy.

 

Where the Data Comes From

You cannot personalize anything about the user experience without the data to show you how. Get the data you need from:

  • Customer Purchase History: You should have a system in place to keep track of who is buying what. Use that information to figure out how often they’re buying, how often they’re visiting your website (whether they are making purchases or not), how they got to your website in the first place, and more. This will help you figure out what keeps people coming back, so you can include it in any future strategy.
  • Website Analytics: Google Analytics and other platforms can help you see demographic information about your visitors – such as where they live, their age, gender, and the device they’re using to access your website. You’ll see how people came to your website, what page they came in on, what pages they visited, which page they left on, and how long they were there. This information can help you see which demographic segments find your business the most appealing.
  • Social Media Profiles: If you’ve implemented social login options on your website, you can sometimes see social profile information on your customers. This information can help you learn how to further personalize user experience.

People don’t mind giving information to companies, if that information is used to improve their experience. However, the majority of online users want to know why you’re asking for their information, what information you’re asking for, and how you’re going to use. For best results, keep the customer in control of the information they share, and allow them to revoke that permission should they decide to do so in the future.

According to a global study from Microsoft, The Consumer Data Value Exchange, people want to be rewarded for the information they share with a company. 56% of people are okay with sharing their date of birth and address, and 53% are okay with sharing basic demographics like age, marital status, and gender.

But, 64% expect cash rewards and 49% say they’d expect significant discounts in exchange for the information. 26% of customers are willing to exchange their date for services that help the find new products, ideas, and content, and 29% are okay with the information sharing for an improved streamlined process.

Whatever you do – make sure the data collection remains transparent, respects customer boundaries, and helps add value for the customer.

  1. Use Dynamic Content

As your customers browsing habits provide a wealth of data about them, you can present more targeted content for each visitor. With every page they view, form they fill out, and email they open, you’ll have more information to further fine-tune the content they’re presented with each time they visit you. As they see the changes whenever they take a look at your site, they’ll begin to see how the content is personalized to them, thereby appreciating the effort to make the experience about them.

  1. Make Recommendations

Leading retailers show product recommendations based on browsing and purchase history. This not only helps to personalize user experience individually, but can also help increase revenue. Amazon, for instance, shows products to buy based on past viewing history. But, they take it one step further and show items that are frequently purchased together, as well as related products customers have also bought after buying a product.

You can use a similar recommendation engine that will become increasingly more accurate as customers use your website. Though the data is from 2012, the Amazon recommendation engine helped increase sales by 29%, likely because they’ve integrated recommendations in nearly every part of the purchasing process, even sending out emails with recommendations based on purchase history.

  1. Use Smart Calls-to-Action (CTA)

Smart CTAs know when customers have already viewed the product, so another CTA steps in to replace the original. If you’re getting repeat visits to your ecommerce site, it’s not ideal to offer the same things over and over. If a customer clicks the “Learn More” button, they don’t need to see the same CTA on the second or third visit as they did on the first. If they download a white paper that shows information about your products the first time they come by, they should be getting another offer for more information on subsequent visits or logins. Studies show personalized CTAs convert 42% better than static, so there’s no reason to serve the same old thing to everyone.

  1. Location-Based Personalization

Many online retailers also have mobile apps to complement them, making it easy to reach people while they’re on the go. For instance, with the Kohl’s app, you’ll get special offers via push notifications when you’re near a physical store location. But, not only can you shop in the app whenever you want, you can manage and redeem your Kohl’s Cash and gift cards, as well as your Yes2You Rewards. You can customize the app with store mode to choose your local Kohl’s, check prices, see related items, and search store inventory. If you place an order within the Kohl’s app while at the Kohl’s store, you’ll even get free shipping.

But this works in other ways, too. If your customer is at the gym, your mobile app can offer them a special deal on protein bars from the store that’s around the corner, or a heart rate monitor.

Location personalization is available on desktop websites, as well, with retailers like T-Mobile asking permission to get your location data so they can show you deals available in your area, as well as the closest store locations.

  1. Personalize Your Emails

A 2013 report revealed personalized emails generate an average of 600% more revenue than non-personalized emails. But, surprisingly, 70% of brands aren’t personalizing email. Personalized email, at the very least featuring the recipient’s name in the subject, can help improve your brand impression.

Email personalization also improved unique open rates by 29%, and unique click through rates by 41%. Personalized subject lines got 26% higher open rates overall, with travel industry emails getting the biggest boost as a result of the tactic.

  1. Make it Social

If you offer social login, social sharing, and social invitations, you can merge social media platforms with your website experience. Amazon makes it easy to share your purchases with your friends and family on Facebook, Twitter, and via email. You can do the same thing, because when people are really excited a purchase, they’re likely to share it with their friends. And when the purchase gets shared with the network, there’s a chance at least one, if not more of those friends will click through to learn more about the product. There’s also a chance that at least one of those click throughs will translate to a purchase. A purchase that likely would not have happened without the social share.

  1. Personalize Your Loyalty Program

70% of customers won’t sign up for your loyalty program because it is inconvenient to do so, and takes too much time. 72% of them would be more likely to sign up for the program if the process was simplified with text messaging. 80% of Generation Z is willing to sign up for a loyalty program to get deals and discounts in exchange, though 33% of Millennials say they don’t like rewards programs because there are too many cards to carry.

To increase participation in your program, personalize the offers to the buyer’s shopping habits. It does no good to offer a loyal customer a 25% discount on books, if he shops at your store for tools.

  1. Personalized Live Chat

Your customers are humans, just like you. I know you hate dealing with automated systems as much as I do. Why would you think your customers are different? And why would you think being treated like a number online is any different than dealing with automated phone system? Software can help you engage with your website visitors in real-time, helping them get to the products and services they’re looking for, and impressing them with your top-notch customer service.

Human to human contact generally makes a better experience anyway, but personalizing the experience takes it to the next level. Users should enter their contact information or be invited to register with social login. This will ensure your customer service team has relevant information on hand to personalize the experience.

Personalization vs. Customization

Personalization is not the same thing as customization. Personalization is done on the system side, based on developers and the way users are identified. It can be done at the individual level, or at the group level.

The users themselves, handle customization, when the system allows. This allows them to make the changes they want to improve their experience, such as adjusting the layout, or choosing specific topics of interest. Many online retailers make it possible to choose the number of products to view on a page, or to sort the products in a number of ways, such as alphabetically, or by price.

Why Personalize User Experience?

As a business, the goal of personalization is to make sure your content and functionality matches your users needs, with no effort from the users themselves. Your system will profile the user and make adjustments to the interface accordingly. This will emphasize or restrict information based on the user’s profile, creating a unique experience. You can also use customization to enhance the user experience, but neither personalization nor customization can fix a broken site.

If you don’t have quality content that captures user interest, then it doesn’t matter how you use personalization or customization. Instead, the solution will lie in changing the site structure or the way the content is presented. Once that’s fixed, you can move into personalization and customization options to improve the experience. Start with personalization because it doesn’t require the user to do any work – and then give users the option to customize their experience based on their preferences. Remember, users will have to invest time in setting everything up to their specifications.

How do you feel about personalization and customization, both as a business owner and an internet user? Tell me below.

Photo credit: iStock

Categories
Digital Marketing

Set Yourself Up for Success in 2017 by Conducting an EOY Analysis Now

The holidays are a busy time of year for us, but the end of the year (EOY) is an excellent time to stop and evaluate your business progress. What you choose to include in yours will depend highly on your niche, products and service, and goals. But, no matter what you choose to include, the purpose is to analyze progress, look for bottlenecks, and locate any time sucks that took away from your productivity, so you can adjust your strategy to make for an even better 2017.

If you’re a small business (yes, even solopreneurs out there) I know you’re stretched thin, running low on time. It’s the holidays, and it’s a stressful time for everyone. It may seem like this is a waste of time – and the goal of this exercise, at least in part is to identify the places you’re wasting time – so you can just skip it, right?

Wrong. Taking the week off – shutting down the business – to collect and analyze your current state and progress compared to last year, or even last quarter, can make it easier for you grow your business in the next year, simply because you can create an informed plan of action.

 

What Can You Include in a EOY Analysis?

It’s a good idea to make your EOY analysis as comprehensive as possible. If you’re digging deep into data and crunching numbers, you may as well go over everything from your financials, to the day to day operations of the business to make sure you’ve covered all bases.

 

Financial

Take a look at your financial documents and statements for the year. If you have an accountant, ask them to go over everything with you to give you a clearer picture of where your business is going.

If you don’t have an accountant, go to your accounts and gather your bank statements. If you use something like PayPal or Quickbooks, then you’ll have a quick profit and loss statement you can use to see where you are.

As you look over your finances, pay close attention to your expenses, and where they are coming from. Are you spending a lot of money on office supplies? Could you find a new vendor to save money next year? Are you spending too much on marketing? Can you reallocate funds to the marketing methods you know are working, away from those that aren’t, so you can at least get a higher return on investment?

What was your profit this year? If you didn’t make any profit this year, what are you projected to do next year? What steps can you take to improve it? Some of the answers may not be clear until you’ve gotten a little further in your analysis, so at least keep note of how much money you’ve spent on the various areas of your business. As you move through the analysis, you can decide if those investments were worth it.

 

Website Traffic

With the financial numbers out of the way, it’s time to start looking at the website traffic numbers. If you’re not already pulling together an end-of-month report, it may be worth it t put it on the list of things to do in 2017 so that next year’s EOY analysis is a little easier to do.

Login to your Google Analytics account. Set the dates on the top right hand side of your screen to January 1, 2016 and December 31, 2016… or whatever the date you’re doing your EOY analysis on that’s closest to the 31st.

This presents you with a full view of your website’s activity for the entire year. You can change the appearance of the graph by clicking on on various options below the date box, including hourly, day, week, or month. These can help depending on the metric you’re looking at.

Key numbers to consider as you’re reviewing your EOY website activity for your business analysis include:

  • Audience Overview: This is the default report you’ll see after you adjust your dates/. This can help you see trends and spot the times of the year that are harder for you to get the kind of traffic you’re used to – which is especially helpful if you’re a seasonal business and some of these things are to be expected. Compare this report to the previous year to see if you’ve grown, and by how much.
  • Site Content: This helps you see what was most popular on your site overall, not just on the blog like you’ll see on the content drilldown report. With it, you’ll be able to see which products or services you offer got the most response, letting you know which services or product lines you may want to consider expanding upon or nixing all together in 2017.
  • Content Drilldown: This will tell you which blog posts were most popular, along with the most popular categories on your website. Create a compiled list of all your blog posts over the year so you can see which ones were clear winners. Though you may have an idea of what your best performing pieces were, the real data may surprise you. When you know what the most popular content is, you can use it to craft a winning strategy for 2017.
  • Social Referrals: This lets you know which social media networks are driving the most traffic to your website. It’s highly possible your traffic isn’t coming from the places you’d expect. It’s not uncommon to find out an outlier, such as a link from anther blog or website that you didn’t even know existed. If you find this to be the case, tweet or shout on Facebook to thank the linking site and share the love with your audience.
  • Page views vs. Social Ad Campaigns: If you’re doing any kind of advertising on a social media platform, your traffic will likely spike up and down, depending on whether or not your campaign is running, and at what capacity. Changes in traffic are okay as long as you can explain why they happened. Some companies will run a campaign all the time to keep analytics and page views from plummeting, but that’s not always an option for businesses on a tight budget. Likely, the more your spending on your campaign, the more exposure you’ll get t and the more traffic you’ll see as a result. But, if you have to stop the campaign, it’s okay to see a dip in traffic because not as many people are seeing your ads and clicking on them.
  • Goal Completions: If you’ve setup your goals in Google Analytics, good job! Look at this report to see how well you were able to meet those goals from month to month. If you met it some months, but didn’t others, what could have influenced that change? If you didn’t setup goals in Analytics, that’s okay, too, but I recommend you do it as soon as you determine what your new goals are, so you can track them with ease in 2017.

 

Social Media

Open all the social media platforms you’re active on, and look at their built-in analytics data. See how you’re doing in terms of follower growth, of course, but realize it’s not necessarily the best indicator of success. What you really want to see is engagement – shares, comments, and likes. But, it’s never a bad idea to have an overview report that looks at:

  • Follower growth
  • Influencers that are following you
  • The number of posts you’ve published
  • The reach rate – how many people saw your posts, either organically or because you were advertising
  • Total engagement
  • Engagement per post – how many people were liking, sharing, commenting on each post, on average?
  • Engagement per follower – are all your followers engaging with you, or is just coming fro a select few of really dedicated fans?
  • Number of clicks – how many people are clicking away from your social media channels to your website?
  • Which network is bringing the most traffic to your website? You’ll be able to find this in the Google Analytics referral report.

If you use social media scheduling tools like Buffer, some paid plans feature analytics data to make it easier to create reports, but you can get all the information you need from Facebook Insights or Twitter Analytics.

 

Reflections on 2016

With all the information you’ve compiled on where you spent money and how much money came in, it’s time to reflect to see what you did well, and where you could make improvements. Some considerations include:

  • Did I hire too many employees too soon? Did I make a mistake by not hiring more employees?
  • Am I ready for employees? Could my business do better using independent contractors to remove some of my liability?
  • What areas did I excel the most in?
  • What areas do I need help in? How can I get that help? Do I need to hire a consultant, or can I do it on my own?
  • Where did my most valuable customers come from?
  • Where did my least valuable customers come from?
  • What kind of money did I pay out to vendors? Are there any vendors or services I no longer need? Can I renegotiate service contracts to save money?
  • What marketing channels worked the best? How can I keep that momentum going?
  • What marketing channels didn’t work as well as I expected? Is there anything I can do to improve their performance, or should I scrap the channels?
  • What kind of content performed well on my website? How can I maximize that type of content for my editorial calendar next year?
  • What kind of content didn’t do so well? Why didn’t it do well? Can it be edited and improved upon, or should it be scrapped?
  • What have I learned?
  • What have I accomplished?
  • What mistakes were made?
  • What obstacles did I face?

 

Planning for 2017

  • How much profit do I want to make this year?
  • How much more money do I need to invest in my business? Where should I invest it for the best possible return?
  • What social media platforms do I want to focus my efforts on? Are there any I should give up on completely? Do I want to try to everything organically or invest in advertising? How much do I want to invest in advertising?
  • What will my social media calendar look like this year?
  • What will my editorial calendar look like this year?
  • Are there any events I can market myself with?
  • Are there any new programs or initiatives for small businesses in my area or my niche that could help me grow this year?
  • What tasks can I eliminate or consolidate to improve my workflow, saving time and money?
  • What are my goals for this year?
  • What can I do throughout the year to make the 2017 EOY analysis process go smoother?

Using the answers to the questions during your reflections on the year, you can now begin to put together the start of a plan for 2017. At this point, you should have a good idea of what your budget looks like, where you’ll need to spend money, where you can save money, and where you can shift money around to get a higher return on your investments.

Do you conduct any kind of EOY analysis for your business? What do you include?

Photo credit: iStock

Exit mobile version