Archives for December 2016
CRO Series: Creating a High-Quality Conversion Funnel
Welcome back to the fourth part of our five-part series on Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). Over the last several weeks we have discussed what exactly CRO is, how you can establish ideal buyer personas, and how you can better connect with those ideal customers. Today, we turn our attention to the types of methods you will use to actually create conversions.
A common example of how businesses create online conversions is what’s known as a conversion funnel. This funnel catches all of your targeted users that you are trying to attract and somehow encourages them to take an action, whether it is in the form of making a purchase or taking some other type of action that is beneficial to your company.
Here are some tips to help you create an engaging, user-focused conversion funnel your audience will appreciate:
- Know what your audience wants: By now, you have already established your buyer personas and researched ways you can better connect with your target audience. Therefore, you should have a pretty good idea of what it is your target audience wants. Now, you must also consider what you can offer to your audience. How will you get them exactly what they need? What methods will you use to solve their problems? What types of information or offers will you put into this conversion funnel?
- Determine the format you’ll deliver these items in: What format will the goods at the top level of the conversion funnel come in? This entirely depends on the interests and needs of your target audiences. Some people will be more likely to consume videos, podcasts or other forms of audio or visual media. Other people might prefer high-quality written content, such as white papers or in-depth blog posts and articles. You might even choose to provide more interactive options, such as online classes, Google Hangouts or webinars. Regardless of which option you choose, make it clear to your audience exactly what you are providing and how it benefits them so you can ensure the best possible user experience.
- Figure out how much this content will cost your audience: The cost does not have to be monetary. It could be something as simple as an opt-in to your email newsletter, or providing some answers to simple survey questions to help you learn more about your customers. But in the vast majority of conversion funnels, there is some sort of cost associated with the content you are providing.
- Make it easy for your customers to get what they want: Of course, having determined your cost, you still need to make it easy for your customers to get that content. Nobody wants to have to jump through a ton of hoops just to download a white paper. People don’t want to feel like they’re being tricked into downloading something. Be upfront right away about what it takes to access the content, and then make the delivery process as simple as possible. Again, it’s all about providing the best possible experience for your users and customers.
- Encourage sharing of your content with friends: You should also make it as easy as possible for people who go through your funnel to share the content with their friends, so you can continue to grow your customer base and collect more user information. Make sure you have social sharing buttons embedded on every page of your website, and even include a message after your users have downloaded your content requesting that they spread the word among their friends and colleagues.
- Keep them coming back for more: Once you’ve had a customer go through your conversion funnel, the process isn’t over for good. You should give them a reason to come back again at some point. Regularly offer new content on your site, and work to develop various series that offer insider tips and tricks. By keeping people coming back to your website over and over again with this content, they will be far more likely to make purchases on your website as well.
- Stay in touch: If you’ve collected email addresses through your conversion funnel, don’t just let them collect dust! Follow up after a reasonable amount of time, and offer them something of value. Add them to your newsletter mailing lists so they stay up to date about what’s happening at your company. Of course, you should avoid spamming your contacts, but a reasonable amount of communication is highly encouraged so you can keep your customers thinking about your business.
Conversion funnels are essential elements of any overall CRO campaign. While they do not necessarily directly create sales, they do create more customer engagement and loyalty, which is a key element of conversion rate optimization.
Next week, we will wrap up our CRO series with a discussion of CRO analytics and the types of tools you can use to track your success.
Thomas von Ahn
Chief Elephant Slayer for Viral Solutions LLC
“Achievement seems to be connected with action. Successful
men and women keep moving. They make mistakes but they
don’t quit.” — Conrad Hilton
Let's Chat! Set up an appointment with me HERE.
CRO Series: Connecting With Your Ideal Customers
Welcome back to our five-part series focused on conversion rate optimization (CRO). Last time, we discussed how to develop a buyer persona: a sort of model of the ideal customer you would have at your business. Today we discuss the next step: actually reaching out and connecting with your target demographics to encourage them to make those purchase decisions.
It’s not just enough to know who your ideal customer is; you also need to understand how they think, and how you can connect with them.
This means performing plenty of research into your target demographics, which will affect everything from establishing a solid marketing plan to creating entirely new ideas for your company. CRO is all about making your marketing more effective and efficient, which means you must work to create true connections with your target audience.
Here is an overview of the steps you will need to take after clearly defining your target buyer personas.
Consider where your target audience can be reached
Where you find your target audience or the specific tools and channels you use to connect with them depends largely on their demographic information and trends, which you have already established in your buyer persona research. A younger, more tech-savvy audience is more likely to be reached via social media networks like Facebook and Twitter, for example, while an audience that skews slightly older might be best reached via television marketing, email or direct mail.
Always keep your customers in the loop
You can’t expect to connect with your target customers if you never actually make an effort to reach out to them. Keep your customers informed about the various goings on at your company, such as new product launches, new services, upcoming promotions, new content on your website and anything else that they may be interested in.
This, of course, isn’t to say that you should be flooding your customers’ inboxes or social media feeds. This type of communication should be performed in moderation to be truly effective, or else you run the risk of having your customers tune you out. But again, you need to at least engage in some form of regular communication to keep a strong connection with your target audience.
Ask for feedback about how you can better serve them
If you’re struggling to figure out how you can best connect with your customers, you can always ask your customers themselves. It might sound overly simplistic, but the truth is that polls, surveys and other similar outreach tactics can provide you with some excellent feedback and information that you wouldn’t otherwise receive. This type of feedback gives you a much stronger level of insight into your customers’ needs and interests. Most of the time, these surveys and polls are extremely easy to put together and provide you with near-instant results.
When you choose to use these strategies is really up to you. You could, for example, include a link to an online survey or review in automatically generated emails sent after each online purchase. You could also choose to ask customers who call in to your company if they would be willing to partake in a brief survey about their experience with your business. Whatever method you choose, you should make the process as quick and easy for customers as possible so they are more likely to respond.
Have a personality in your content that aligns with your buyer personas
Any content that you publish on your website, on your social media or any other online channels you have should have at least a little bit of personality to it. Your brand’s “voice” should be inviting and down to earth; a cold, professional tone might work for higher-end businesses or law firms, but if you’re in the world of retail, you need to relax a little bit if you want to be able to better connect with your target audience.
Again, the research you have already done to create your buyer personas should give you a good idea of the kind of language or communication that resonates with your ideal customer. The way you talk to a hip 20-something is probably going to be different than the way you talk to a 40-year-old mother with two or three children. You should keep this in mind whenever developing any content for your business.
Offer a little something extra
If you want to go the extra mile in connecting with your customers, you might consider offering special promotions or deals to people whom you have already identified as being a prime target. These may or may not be people who have already purchased from your company. Based on your buyer persona research and the way you have researched and organized your target lists, you should be able to determine what types of promotions have the most potential. These types of promotions truly help to create loyalty in your customers and make it far more likely that you will create more conversions.
These are just a few of the many factors you should take into consideration when looking to create better connections with your customers. The stronger the connection between brand and customers, the better your conversion rate optimization performance will be.
Thomas von Ahn
Chief Elephant Slayer for Viral Solutions LLC
“Achievement seems to be connected with action. Successful
men and women keep moving. They make mistakes but they
don’t quit.” — Conrad Hilton
Let's Chat! Set up an appointment with me HERE.
CRO Series: Developing Buyer Personas for Your Business
Last week, we began a five-part series about conversion rate optimization (CRO) by providing a general outline of what exactly CRO is and its history and evolution in the world of marketing. We also provided some examples of strategies associated with CRO.
Today, we are going to begin discussing some of these strategies in depth, beginning with the very first step to any excellent CRO campaign: buyer persona research.
What are buyer personas?
A buyer persona is a general characterization of your ideal customer. Creating a concrete, tangible representation of your ideal customer helps you to better understand the kinds of messages that will resonate with them the most. By understanding your buyer personas, you are more likely to create successful products, share interesting and engaging content, and perform well in your customer service and retention. This makes the development of buyer personas the first step in successful CRO.
Creating a buyer persona takes a bit of research. You need to survey the right people about their interests, feelings, problems and pain points, while collecting demographic information as well. The amount of buyer personas you have will vary depending on the size of your company and the range of products or services you sell. You might just have one or two, or you could have a dozen or more.
Almost as important as the standard buyer persona is the “negative” persona. This is a representation of everything you do not want in a customer. Perhaps your negative persona falls outside of the demographic you want to target. Maybe they are too expensive to acquire, or already has advanced knowledge in a field in which you are targeting beginners.
How do I create buyer personas?
You can use surveys, interviews and other forms of research to get in touch with your taret audience to see who is more likely to be interested in your brand, product or service. Here are a few tactics you can use to gather the information needed to create accurate and effective buyer personas:
- Discover trends: Analyze your entire contacts list you have compiled for your business, and see if there are any trends present regarding how people found your website or the types of content they like to consume on it. These trends can give you an initial indication as to which types of people are your ideal customers.
- Collect information: When you develop contact forms or other types of forms to use on your website, require them to enter important demographic information into your form fields. This will make collecting information significantly easier; they are giving it to you, rather than you having to actively go out and search for the information yourself. Plus, the information you get will be of higher quality than the digital equivalent of cold calling, as anyone who is giving you this information already has shown an interest in your brand.
- User outside data resource:Â Resources exist online that allow you to upload what you do know, such as an email address, so that a report can be generated which contains intelligence. Data returned can include age, gender, income, marital status, occupation, education, home owner status and interests.
- Analyze sales team feedback: Consider the kind of feedback your sales team is getting during their interactions with leads. Can they form any generalizations based on these interactions about which type of customers are most likely to lead to sales?
- Interview customers or targets: Any existing customers you have are a great place to start with your research. These are people who have already purchased your service or product, which means they are significantly more likely to exemplify the buyer persona you wish to attract. However, you should also reach out to prospects and referrals who have not yet purchased from your company and, based on the data you have about them, show they at least have the potential to fit your target buyer persona. When conducting interviews, make sure you are clear the interview is not being performed with the intention of selling them something. You can even offer them some sort of incentive, such as a discount or free sample, for participating.
- Know what data to collect: Regardless of how you collect data to form your buyer personas, it is important you collect the right This includes current employment information, general demographic information, educational information, the types of challenges or problems they face, the kinds of publications they like to read, the social media networks on which they are active, how they use the internet to either research or purchase products and services, recent purchases they’ve made, etc.
You cannot have outstanding conversion rate optimization without choosing the perfect customers to whom you gear your marketing. Begin by developing a buyer persona, and every step that follows will become significantly easier.
Contact us today at Viral Solutions for more information about creating buyer personas. Next week, we continue to discuss the best strategies for improving your CRO.
Thomas von Ahn
Chief Elephant Slayer for Viral Solutions LLC
“Achievement seems to be connected with action. Successful
men and women keep moving. They make mistakes but they
don’t quit.” — Conrad Hilton
Let's Chat! Set up an appointment with me HERE.
CRO Series: What Is Conversion Rate Optimization?
Over the next several weeks, we are going to spend some time going in-depth into the idea of conversion rate optimization (CRO), discussing best practices, important analytics, examples of successful strategies, and more.
But before we investigate these details of CRO, we will have a discussion about what CRO is on a general level, how it became such an important aspect of business, and the kinds of strategies and processes associated with it.
What is conversion rate optimization (CRO)?
At the most basic level, CRO is the practice of getting people to take some sort of action once they have landed on your website. The goal of any CRO system is to increase the percentage of visitors to your website who turn into paying customers (a process called conversion), or at least take some other sort of action, such as signing up for a newsletter.
There have been variations of CRO as long as there has been business, but the online version we are specifically referring to arose out of the dot-com boom in the early 2000s. When more businesses started building a presence on the internet and competition began to quickly increase online, there was a need for marketers to figure out more effective ways to reach their customers and create sales. This meant finding measurable ways to improve their marketing tactics and the overall user experience.
By 2007, the introduction of Google’s Website Optimizer had made CRO much more approachable for small business owners, who did not necessarily have the same technological savvy as many of their big-time competitors who could afford tech specialists.
CRO has obviously evolved a great deal over the last decade and a half. Strategies that worked in 2006 may no longer work today (and might in fact actually harm your CRO). But the general principles of CRO are timeless: give your customers the best online experience possible, and get them interested enough in what you have to offer that they will take the action you wish them to.
What are examples of strategies associated with CRO?
Here is a quick overview of some of the most common strategies associated with CRO. In the coming weeks, we will hit on some of these strategies in greater detail:
- Persona research: A “persona” is a sort of characterization or profile of your ideal customer or a potential visitor to your website. Think of the ways you’d describe this customer; perhaps they’re a 40-year-old woman with a couple young kids in the suburbs. Perhaps they’re a hip, single 20-something in the big city.
- Persona journeys: Taking the “persona” you have come up with, consider the type of journey your user will go through to find your website, what they will most likely do once they’ve found your website, the kinds of information they want, the offers that are most likely to them, and other behavioral considerations that could potentially affect how you set up your website.
- Focus groups and surveys: Getting actual customers involved in the marketing process is a key element of CRO used by many businesses. Invite customers in for focus groups, or conduct large-scale surveys to get responses and opinions about your brand’s messaging from actual customers.
- Demographic targeting: CRO is all about finding the people who are most likely to take action on your site and marketing to them. This involves a great deal of demographic analysis and targeting. The persona research phase helps you determine your ideal demographics. The targeting process involves reaching them where they’re most likely to listen (social media, surveys, phone calls, focus groups, etc) to better understand and serve them.
- A/B testing: Test multiple versions of each web page to see which is most effective. Take a page on your site, make a copy of it, and change just one or two things. Direct half the traffic that goes to your standard A web page to your B web page, and keep going until you’ve created a good sample size. In doing so, you’ll be able to analyze which copy is more effective, and keep the copy that performs better. Over the course of time, you’ll develop a better understanding of how to speak to your customers.
- User testing: Get a bunch of average people to try out your website and have them tell you what they do and do not like about it. You’ll be surprised what you can learn from a group of people who are coming at your site with fresh eyes.
- Analytics: Google Analytics has a wealth of data that can influence your CRO. You can track conversions, the data leading to those conversions, and even the data that does not lead to conversions.
As a small business, you must commit to a steadfast focus on conversion rate optimization to get the most out of your online sales. Come back next week for more information about CRO and its best practices.
Thomas von Ahn
Chief Elephant Slayer for Viral Solutions LLC
“Achievement seems to be connected with action. Successful
men and women keep moving. They make mistakes but they
don’t quit.” — Conrad Hilton
Let's Chat! Set up an appointment with me HERE.
Must-Have Content Sections on Your eCommerce Site
If you are selling a product or service on your website, you need to employ a content marketing strategy that allows you to cut through the messaging put forth by your competition. But before you focus on creating regular blogs or determining the perfect AdWords advertisement, you must have certain generic information about your business on your main page that will convince people to purchase from you.
Here are examples of these must-have sections of content for your eCommerce site:
- Shipping information: Shipping is one of the key factors in purchase decisions for many shoppers, and yet there are so many businesses that fail to put appropriately detailed shipping information on their website. Customers will get extremely frustrated if they go through the entire process of putting an item in their cart and going to check out, only to discover that you do not ship to their location or it costs more than they expected. Have clear shipping information on your site, displayed in an easy-to-read manner, is important for creating informed and satisfied customers.
- Special offers: Create an entirely separate section to give visitors to your site quick access to any sales or special offers you have. These promotions are another main driver of sales, so they should be easily accessible.
- Payment options: According to a study from Mobile Marketing Magazine, up to 28 percent of customers will decide against a purchase if you do not accept their preferred payment method. If it is not feasible to offer all major payment methods, you should be able to use content to clearly display what payment forms you do This transparency will avoid unpleasant surprises for customers and allow them to adjust their purchase accordingly rather than abandoning it altogether.
- Frequently asked questions: Having an FAQ section on your site is important, as the vast majority of customers prefer searching for information themselves than having to contact a customer service representative. An FAQ section is a chance to provide some additional key information that might not fit in other sections of your site, while also building on your SEO.
- Returns policy: Having your returns policy clearly printed on your site once again serves to avoid unpleasant surprises for customers who make a purchase. A clear returns policy could help customers who are on the fence about purchasing from you to decide to give you a chance.
All of this content should be clearly visible on the main section of your site. For more tips about the basic forms of necessary content for an eCommerce site, contact us at Viral Solutions.
Queen of the Machine for Viral Solutions LLC
“If a brand genuinely wants to make a social contribution, it should start with who they are, not what they do. For only when a brand has defined itself and its core values can it identify causes or social responsibility initiatives that are in alignment with its authentic brand story.” ~ Simon Mainwaring
