Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)

Online conversion optimisation was born out of the need of online marketers for lead generation and e-commerce site to improve their profit. My starting point has always been maximizing a website’s full potential.

I would rather have 10 visitors and 3 conversions instead of 100 visitors and 1 conversion…wouldn’t you? I just love digging into (analytics) data to get inspired and then to start creating hypotheses on what to improve and test. In my opinion it’s a lot about reducing friction (haven’t we all experienced those really irritating moments when you try to order something online?), so an easy win might be to reduce these moments to zero. And make this a really smooth experience.

Brick and Mortar conversion optimisation.

How long have brick-and-mortal shops been around? For ages for sure; and they have been optimised for conversions; or at least they should have been. The web has been around since the 1990’s; and we are still seeing a lot of websites which are not being optimised (I sometimes state that part of the web is in their medieval web-ages).

There is a problem with conversion rate optimisation: It looks easy. Most of us with some experience working online can take a look at a website and quickly find problems that may prevent someone from converting into a customer. There are a few such problems that are quite common:

• Lack of customer reviews.
• Lack of trust / security signals.
• Bad communication of USP’s (Unique Selling Points).

But in essence there are some real questions to be answered:

1. Why does the company exist (or website for that matter)?
2. What are the goals of the company (what would succes be on the website)?
3. What are the Unique Selling Points (USP’s) of the company and it’s product / service?
4. What are the customers fears (what would people ask in a real store)?
5. What is the User experience on the website (speed, usability etc.)?
6. What are the main traffic sources for the website?
7. What are visitors worth to you (or any action they do for that matter)?

If I ask these questions a lot of information comes up but also a lot of answers that reflect the business owner’s view instead of what a possible customer is looking for. That is the major shift these question trigger. Which in my opinion is a great thing!

Because then we (I always see it as a joined effort) can start to really optimise your website.