the beginners guide to conversion rate optimization

@joshsteimle

The Beginner's Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization

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Digital marketing for tech companies.

@joshsteimle@joshsteimle

The problem.

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You want to see marketing directly tied to revenue.

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) vs. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

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It’s not “one or the other.”

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SEO generates traffic.

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CRO turns that traffic into leads and sales.

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“Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the art and science of getting people to act once they arrive on your website.”Source: SiteTuners CEO, Tim Ash

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Everything you do with your marketing and website affects CRO.

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Everything… Right down to the color of buttons.

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Let’s get started.

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1. Persona research.

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A “persona” is a fictitious profile of a potential visitor to your website, or potential customer of your services.

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These affect web design, content creation, keywords for SEO.

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2. User journey scenarios.

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Fueled by persona research data, you must be able to answer UX questions like:

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• What will the targeted “persona” do on the website?

• What information are they looking for?

• What’s most clickable?

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Customer journey mapping helps you understand your customer better and it allows you to design accordingly.

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3. Focus groups.

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Qualitative research may have some detractors…

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But focus groups can add another point of reference.

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Also, provokes valuable hypotheses for testing.

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4. User surveying.

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You don’t have to base potential updates and redesigns entirely on survey results.

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This extra viewpoint influences experiments for collecting hard data.

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5. Demographic and psychographic analysis & targeting.

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“Demographics explain ‘who’ your buyer is, while psychographics explain ‘why’ they buy.”

Source: Maggie Hibma, HubSpot

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Ways to collect psychographic data…

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• Marketing data analysis • Sales and support teams • Surveys • Social Media • Focus Groups

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6. Web psychology.

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Learning the psychology of your audience is key for effective communication.

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7. A/B split testing.

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Pick a web page and copy it.

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Change specific elements to the “new” page and split traffic evenly.

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Whichever page performs better should be adopted; drop the other.

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Warning:

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Do not mistake A/B testing as being all you need to improve CRO.

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8. Multivariate testing.

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Deliberately changing multiple variables to test various combinations.

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This gives you more data than A/B testing.

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9. User testing.

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“Your website should be so simple, a drunk person could use it.”

Source: Richard Littauer, TheUserIsDrunk.com

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http://TheUserIsDrunk.com



10. Usability testing.

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Usability Testing ≠

User Testing

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Usability experts run tests on your website.

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Testing expectancy, closed cart sort, brand perception, etc.

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11. Eye-tracking and heat map analysis.

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These tools allow you to see what your users are looking at and clicking on.

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Use these insights to implement changes that can improve conversions.

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12. Analytics analysis.

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Google analytics is a gold mine of data!

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You can track what leads to a conversion.

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And best of all…

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You can track what doesn’t lead to conversions!

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@joshsteimle

Want more? @joshsteimle [email protected] www.mwi.com/blog

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