5 Steps to Creating a Successful Conversion Optimization Strategy

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is critical to your company’s success.

A higher conversion rate directly translates into a better ROI: it is more cost effective to retain visitors than to find new ones.

A common frustration for online businesses is that despite heavy traffic to their website, those visitors are still not taking action, such as registering for a demo, starting a free trial period of the software, or purchasing the product.

There are ways to develop a successful conversion optimization strategy to deal with this critical issue.

Follow these 5 Steps for an optimized conversion strategy:

Step 1. Align Website Objectives to Business Goals

Ask yourself: What are your business goals and does your website support them?

To successfully develop a conversion optimization strategy, assessing your objectives is an important step. If your website objectives do not support the goals of the business, this will create unclear results of website confusion and chaos.

For greatest results, senior personnel in the marketing or product development must conduct this process. Senior level commitment will ensure that the correct resources will be available to keep the business goals and process linked.

Step 2. Prioritize Conversion Funnels

The conversion funnels are the set of web pages or steps that a given visitor to the website goes through to complete an action on the site.

Once the conversion funnels have been identified and prioritized, create an ordered list of funnels and pages to improve.

To do this, look at the web analytics data. See which pages have high traffic with a low conversion rate or high exit rate and high visitor acquisition cost. Overall, you need to find the areas where there is a lot of expensive traffic that is poorly converted.

Step 3. Ensure Clarity in User Experience

To get the most of your site and to help increase website conversion rates, it is important that there is clarity and ease in your user experience. Clarity of communication includes the content, layout and design featured on the site. You want to make sure that the eye flow in design is not hindered and that the content, text and images are effectively used to minimize comprehension time.

These common inquiries reveal that usability and a simple user experience are integral to booting conversion rates.

Step 4. Test It

A common problem with conversion optimization strategies is that there is a huge potential for failure; however, these failures can put you on the right path towards huge improvements in the long-run.

This whole process is about trial and error.

You need to be prepared to take risks. By testing your hypotheses, you will gather results to figure out which is the most effective approach for your company’s objectives. In doing so, you can better manage the demands of the site visitors.

Step 5. Continue to Measure and Analyse

It is easy to find out what the problem is from a test result, but your analytics will be more powerful if you figure out why this is occurring. By comparing the performance of your test variations, you will discover insights about your prospective users and customers, which will lead to better tests for the next time.

Testing is the best measure we have to identify if customer needs are being met and where we are failing to meet customer expectations.

Gartner writes, “The risks of not meeting customer expectations in terms of product ergonomics, function and quality can do long-term damage to a brand, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to recover from this.” Measuring and analyzing allows you to better identify where customer needs are being met and where improvement is required.

Looking Forward –

CRO allows you to retain higher profit from incoming traffic with little additional costs. It is a process which needs to be continually updated and improved, so your numbers and analytics are critical.

Every quarter, check back in with these 5 steps and see if you met all the criteria, or if you can challenge yourself to push your CRO a little further.

(first published on SaaSaddict - http://saasaddict.walkme.com/5-steps-creating-successful-conversion-optimization-strategy/)