If you want your brand to penetrate a slowly-growing digital market, you likely need that extra boost to make sure your marketing efforts go in the right direction. Part of this is ensuring not only that you get conversions, but that you practice conversion optimisation. This can be challenging to hear at first, especially if this is a new concept for you. Luckily, this article is here to help you do just that – or at the very least, give you a helpful nudge in the right direction and leave you armed with the basics.

If you want to start getting into conversion optimisation, it may help to gain a bit of insight into how this is performed in the real world first. Venture Harbour numbers indicate that conversion optimisation has become quite an essential part of marketing campaigns given the renewed focus on UX and mobile designs over the past few years. While desktop-based conversions still trump smartphones and tablets on a global scale, the numbers do hold some degree of truth: if you want to pursue conversion optimisation, you’ve got to be thorough and cover all devices. In this Conversion Optimisation 101 article, you’ll learn not only what it is, but how to achieve it.

• Conversion optimisation, in its most basic sense, simply means being able to find ways to make sure elements of your campaign and marketing strategy are built, maintained, and improved according to precisely how you want it to affect the conversion process. This way, your conversions themselves can be built around the idea of pushing towards your company goals without relying too much on risks and chances. It also means that your selected campaign tools have to be carefully tailored to meet this goal. For instance:
• Trust matters, and your conversions have to be built around trust in order to last. This is by no means a philosophical banter, but something you should consider when thinking about making sales. If you want a person to avail your service, you have to build a relationship with them. Relationships require trust, even when it comes to selling a service. As such, you have to tailor your campaign in such a way that it builds trust with your leads, prospects, and customers.
  • Use words such as “According,” “Because,” “Due to,” “Backed,” “Cancel anytime,” “Moneyback,” “No obligation,” and other similar terms, as inclusion of a choice allows you to give urgency to the customer. Accordingly, this helps establish the fact that they have a degree of power over a transaction, which can be appealing.
  • Establish relationships by featuring content from audiences. Customers may be inclined to trust people in the same position as them, and things such as testimonials and reviews are powerful and can generate appeal.
  • Be objective and feature numbers such as relevant data and statistics that are backed by research. This gives your audience a “neutral” view of your product, especially from a research standpoint. If research (which is supposed to be objective) backs your product, then you’re more likely to be perceived as trustworthy.
• Identify user intent and tailor your campaign to match it. While keywords hold signs of checking what your consumers want at any given time, try to look at trends from a different perspective. Instead of looking for “words,” look for strings and quotes that users will likely use to find their interests in this search-based era.
  • Check for quotes and queries such as navigational queries (“where is X”), informational queries (“actor X”), and transactional queries (“service X in place of Y”) as these identify user interests.
  • Make sure you tailor your service and products, as well as your campaigns, to match these. Make use of tools such as Google For Business and online listings, as well as naturally-added phrases, to establish that you meet their needs and gain traction in SEO. If you’re unsure how to do this, one idea is to hire a CRO agency.
• Quality counts, as users look for immersion and experience. If there’s anything today’s digital society can tell us, it’s that because information can be accessed by almost anyone, anywhere, the “value” of anything is greatly leveraged on the emotion it offers others. In short, when presenting your brand, it has to come with an experience unique to the customer in mind.
  • Try to assess what kind of content you’re offering alongside your brand. Are you offering them something unique that can help “enhance” their everyday lives?
  • How involved are they in the sales funnel aside from being mere customers? Sometimes, making customers feel as though they have a positive impact in the flow of transactions (customizable packages, being able to comment on transactions, a reliable customer service) can provide better immersion and as such provide better opportunities to optimize conversions.
• Make sure your call-to-actions make sense, and actually encourage action. Call-to-actions such as “Buy now!” are easy to use, but optimising them to actually urge prospects to buy (be converted) can be challenging. Good CTAs, and content in general, is action-oriented. This means providing readers and prospects with the means to act upon a potential intention to buy and actually give them the means to avail their services.
  • You can do this by actively encouraging them to use your service in the content itself. You can integrate your service into your pieces by saying your service can greatly assist with the tasks your pieces are helping customers with.
  • You can use engaging visuals to provide a more colorful and vibrant take on your call-to-actions. If you can demonstrate how your product or service has helped others while offering a CTA, you may be able to encourage customers to buy from you.

The Bottom Line:

Conversion optimisation, as the name implies, revolves around making sure that conversions are taking place on your website by chance, but are carefully being tailored not just according to a content plan, but the appropriate strategy. It’s important to remember that being able to optimise your conversions mean finally being able to tap into specific consumer bases that can greatly increase traffic and trust in your company’s content.

James is the founder of Conversion Rate Optimization and A/B testing obsessed digital marketing agency, Web Marketing ROI. They help brands with high-traffic websites optimize their conversion rate using A/B testing and personalization.