As consumers are increasingly overloaded with advertising messages from a wide range of digital channels and technologies, competition to stand out is fiercer than ever. At the same time, the cost of digital advertising is increasing, and getting that initial click is just the beginning of the journey. It’s time to focus on what happens next.
Imagine this. One day, the plumbing fails at home, so you have to go and collect water from a nearby fountain. You plod along, fill up a huge bucket, then to your dismay notice on the walk back that the bucket is full of holes and your precious liquid is leaking all over the street. What would you do in such a situation?
- You could find a new bucket without holes
- You could try to fix the holes, possibly starting with the larger ones
- You could simply pour more water in the leaking bucket to compensate for the water that flows through the holes
On paper, this last option seems ludicrously wasteful. Nonetheless, it is the way many companies manage their online digital marketing budget. With a website that can only transform a very small percentage of visitors into customers, the most common solution that businesses adopt to keep growing is – rather than improving the website conversion rate – increasing incoming traffic. Essentially, pouring more water into a leaking bucket.
Of course, it’s not the right solution. What brands need to do in this situation is fix the leaking bucket and multiply their return on investment – and the good news is, it’s not difficult to do, nor does it require a bigger advertising budget. Most of the time, reallocating as much as 10-20% of your entire digital marketing budget into a conversion optimisation program will be enough to see a significant improvement. Conversion Rate Optimisation is not a magic formula, nor a series of tricks, but a sound process and a set of strategies and tactics applied according to a rigorous scientific method.
Conversion Rate Optimisation should be part of your media plan
Investing in conversion rate optimisation (CRO) will have several benefits.
- It will reduce your acquisition cost, which will in turn allow you to get more conversions for the same budget – effectively increasing the value of each $ spent in advertising.
- The decrease in acquisition cost can be leveraged in two ways: you could maintain or even increase the budget allocation for high-performing channels, to make the most of the new efficiency; or you could choose to reallocate part of the budget to test new channels, creating a more robust and diverse marketing plan.
- The best CRO results come from removing obstacles and frictions from the purchasing funnel, and increasing the clarity of the messages to make the customer’s life easier. Improving the user experience contributes to reinforcing a positive, and more pleasant brand image.
- CRO activities generate another benefit that is less obvious, but which cannot be underestimated. Each optimisation activity – in particular all the testing activities – generates validated learning, allowing us to gather better and stronger customer insights. Looking at the results of an A/B test, we can understand which factors have or have not influenced our customers purchase decisions, giving us a solid data point from which to update our customer portrait.
It’s all about data
The most important point to understand is that when it comes to Conversion Rate Optimisation your opinions (or mine) do not matter. The only thing that matters is what you can prove with data and experimental results. So the implementation of a serious conversion optimisation program requires a change of perspective for your digital team. Each optimisation effort should be focused on one of two goals: improve revenues or collect better data. Revenues are obviously your ultimate goal, but without data, there is no optimisation – just guesswork. Crack that change in approach, and you’ll go a long way.