Sophie D’Souza is the Vice President of Optimization at Spiralyze, a data conversion rate optimization firm. She has helped companies grow revenue by millions of dollars.
Digital growth driven through A/B testing and optimization provides support for her view in life that everything can be iterated and improved upon.
The Importance of Conversion Rates
She is going to discuss conversion rate optimization and increasing your website conversion rates. Your website is the face of your business. It’s the storefront display and the shiny book cover. Your customers judge the quality of your product or service by the quality of your website.
Conversion rate optimization is the systematic process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action. These desired actions can be different things:
- Make a purchase
- Fill out a form
- Click a link
Online stores desire direct sales. Software companies want people to fill out a form to receive a demo.
Growth = Traffic x Conversion
You need both traffic and conversion to fuel growth in sales. You can double or triple your business by increasing your traffic, and you you’ll lower your acquisition costs when you increase your conversion rate.
Email marketing can take advantage of valuable assets on your website to inspire people to click and engage with your content. The value of your company goes up along with your conversion rate.
A/B Testing
Websites are usually the product of a committee, not a single person. Many people bring their expertise in different areas to design a website that appeals to customers. A/B testing allows you to experiment with several tactics to see which one performs the best. The one with a higher conversion rate wins.
A/B testing isn’t a one-time thing, either. You can run test after test to keep making incremental adjustments to your Web pages to strengthen their conversions.
Quantitative and Qualitative Research
Analyzing your Web pages quantitatively and qualitatively yields useful results. Quantitative research includes:
- Funnels
- Where drop-offs occur
- Bounce rates
Qualitative research includes:
- Heatmap of people’s attention
- How far people scroll down on pages
- User interviews
- Competitor research
The research you conduct will help you with the following five aspects of your website:
Relevance
Make sure each Web page’s copy is relevant to what people are searching for. If one of your online ads promises certain things, make sure that the copy on the page it links to makes good on those promises. If people don’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll be less likely to visit another of your links.
Trust
Your site should look professional and offer assurances to visitors that you are trustworthy. You can build trust through testimonials, case studies, mentions by other authoritative sources, and simply knowing what you’re talking about in the copy.
Value
Customers want to know: what’s in it for me? Don’t just talk about how great your business’s products and services are. Answer the crucial question your customers have. Let them know how you can benefit them and solve their problems.
Objections
Find out what objections and problems people are having when they contact your customer support and sales teams. Then offer positive refutations of those objections on your website. For example, if someone objects to a high price, try to emphasize the value they receive.
Friction
Do you have an unnecessarily difficult process people have to complete to engage with your website? A form that’s too long or a broken shopping cart create friction that disrupts the flow of user interactions.