
Conversion Optimization Delivers Big in a Results-Driven World
In today’s competitive online environment, results matter. Here’s how digital marketers are boosting conversion rates by up to 91.4% – and that’s just the beginning.
The online marketing landscape has changed significantly. Only 5 years ago, e-mail marketing was in its heyday, PPC was all the rage, the behemoth that would be social media was just emerging, SEO was reaching its climax, and case studies and whitepapers were as good as gold.
Today, the online marketing landscape is vastly different and, like many marketers, you might be asking yourself whether you’ve maxed out your current marketing strategies.
Online Media Is Getting Old, Fast
It’s becoming more difficult to get positive returns from today’s common tactics.
Consider this:
• E-mail response rates are down
• PPC costs continue to rise
• SEO is backfiring (think Panda and Penguin)
• Facebook has lost its luster
• Content marketing is burdened by high cost and reader fatigue
As these channels have matured and the novelty worn-off, marketers are left asking, “What’s next?”
Regardless of which tactics you use to drive traffic, to remain competitive, you need to get the most value out of your marketing investment. You need to do more with the traffic you’re already attracting to your website and landing pages.
Conversion Optimization Creates Marketing Effectiveness
That’s where conversion optimization comes into play.
At its core, conversion optimization is about maximizing revenue-generating engagement from all of your marketing touchpoints. That is why it’s gaining so much attention today. It allows marketers to get more return from all of their current investments in both inbound and outbound marketing. Not only that, with controlled conversion testing, you gain insights into your customer behavior, which can be applied to other marketing activities for even greater benefit.
Take the example of Trafford Consulting (working on behalf of Green Tech Investments), a consumer lead generation company providing ethical investment advice. For years, they had been successfully driving traffic through traditional marketing tactics: PR, tradeshows and advertising in industry publications. They had also supplemented these offline efforts with paid search campaigns that directed traffic to a purpose-built landing page for “The Green Guide”, a free ethical investment report.
The landing page was considered to be good at converting visitors into leads, but Trafford knew it must be possible to get more conversions out of their client’s paid search investments to demonstrate the power of online marketing.
In order to improve the conversion rate, Trafford decided to embark on a testing and optimization strategy, which included some of the following tactics:
Conversion Optimization Requires Controlled A/B/n Split Testing
A controlled test is set up to include a “control” sample that is tested against a variety of “challenger” samples in order to find the best performing “champion.” It can also be called the “champion-challenger” approach. It is used as a strategy to continuously improve all online marketing assets such as banner ads, emails, landing pages and even entire websites.
Organizations using this strategic approach are achieving significant and continuous improvements in their conversion rates for lead generation, subscriptions, sales and revenue.
Even more exciting is that companies that do the most testing are discovering hidden insights into customer behavior. They understand, with statistical confidence, how to motivate and facilitate their customer actions.
Conversion Optimization Challenges
Initially, when Trafford began their conversion optimization testing, they tested for button colors, headlines and copy tweaks, but the changes in conversion rate were not significant. They had reached a plateau in the improvement they could make.
They needed a reliable approach to understand what to test and why. They found that getting a big conversion rate lift required more than just tweaking and tuning – it required a conversion optimization strategy.
Utilizing a Structured Approach
Econsultancy’s 2011 Conversion Rate Optimization report found that companies who used a structured approach to conversion optimization were twice as likely to experience large improvements in conversion rates than those using less structured testing.
A structured conversion optimization strategy defines how to prioritize website test opportunities, how to identify what to test, how to create hypotheses for each element being tested, how to structure tests for insight-generation, what technology to use, how to monitor and analyze the results, and how to resource and coordinate all these activities.
It starts by developing a conversion optimization strategy to ensure:
• Business goals are aligned with conversion goals
• Web analytics insights are evaluated
• Traffic-building strategies and tactics are coordinated
• Advertised offers and calls-to-action are considered
• Appropriate traffic volumes are in place for testing
• Prospect segmentation is addressed
• Conversion strategists, designers and copywriters are in place
• Selected testing software is appropriate for the strategy
Trafford worked with conversion rate experts at WiderFunnel to develop their conversion optimization strategy and run full-service tests for their landing pages.
Implementing a Strategy-Driven Test Plan
The WiderFunnel team developed and fulfilled the test plan for each landing page including hypothesis development, wireframing, graphic design, copywriting and technical development.
The WiderFunnel strategists used the LIFT Model to analyze the landing page and develop effective test hypotheses.
In one test, the WiderFunnel team developed and tested 3 dramatically redesigned variations of The Green Guide landing page, which included wholesale changes to the design and copywriting approach.
The strategists had determined in the conversion optimization strategy that beginning with a dramatic redesign A/B/n test, also called a “variable cluster” test, would be used in the initial round of testing, leading to multivariate testing in future test rounds. With a variable cluster test, where many variables are changed within each variation, significant conversion rate improvements could be realized faster.
The Result: 91% Lead Generation Conversion Rate Lift
The test results showed that the new Green Guide landing page converted 91% more visitors into leads. That meant that the company generated nearly double the number of sales leads from the same inbound and outbound marketing tactics, without spending more on advertising!
What’s more, the insights gained during the initial testing projects were applied to other landing pages producing similar results.
Making Data-Driven Decisions
When it comes to creative marketi
ng assets such as landing pages, emails and websites, marketers are still making decisions based on gut-feeling alone. “If it looks good to me, then it must work for our customers,” is often the flawed perspective when it comes to creative.
As Trafford and others are finding, however, is that putting creative to the test and making informed decisions about all elements on a webpage is the more reliable strategy.
For example, the rotating home page, which seems to be the current status quo for “good website design” has actually be found to statistically reduce conversions. What about that “hero-shot” with smiling attractive people? Our research has found that it can reduce revenue compared with high-relevance copywriting in the same area.
Many of these commonly held “best practices” are being disproven through testing.
Gaining Marketing Insights
Gaining insights into your target audience is akin to finding a matching puzzle piece. Whether you’re just beginning to piece the picture together or have a comprehensive understanding of your audience, marketing insights derived from testing can add significant value to your overall digital marketing.
Through ongoing testing, marketing teams are seeing patterns and trends with different colors, layouts, design, images and key value proposition messages. These findings can then be used over and over again throughout an organization’s marketing mix for effective results.
Tapping Into Expertise
If your company is new to conversion optimization testing or have tried it and were disappointed with the results, find an external resource to give you a kick-start. Experienced conversion optimization strategists can help you avoid mistakes as well as develop the best testing structure for conversion rate improvements. credit-n.ru
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